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« on: August 25, 2012, 10:58:33 PM »
I think a killer feature for NGUI (especially in the face of the upcoming Unity 4 GUI) is making widgets more geometry and shader based so we don't need an atlas.
For instance, instead of making a rounded button as an atlas sprite that has alpha on rounded corners, I'd rather have the rounded corners be actual geometry. And perhaps have an inner rounded rectangle and then an outline around it both made out of geometry so I could pick two different shader settings on each part to color the outline and the inside part with shaders instead of textures.
Atlas textures are a pain because they are HUGE--compressing them makes them look terrible, and retina iPad resolutions are blowing up application sizes. I think with creative use of geometry and shaders, you could get away with really small atlases. Maybe just for icons and a few other things--but especially if we can use dynamic fonts and geometry/shader based widgets--we can have tiny atlas sizes on even retina iPad.
At the very least, it would be cool if we could create our own widget geometry and have the widget maker use that when creating widgets instead of the default boxes.