Major Issues with NGUI Atlases and Multiple Users

[Morgenstern]

Hi guys,

We're a small indie team currently using NGUI to build the UI of our game and we've recently stumbled on some pretty major issues with the Atlas system (and a few other settings, but they are less vital). We've managed to hack a fix for now, but it'd be nice to see this added to the official NGUI in the future.

First issue - atlas settings such as padding and trim alpha are presented as if they are per-atlas settings when in actual fact they are global settings, they just don't happen to affect things until you rebuild an atlas. This is pretty dangerous in projects with multiple atlases (e.g. most) - if I need one atlas to trim the alpha of its sprites and another to not do that it's very easy to overwrite the settings of the one I am editing with the settings of whichever one I edited last. It's be nice for these to be stored locally on the atlas prefab itself.

Second issue (This one is much more serious, but would be solved by implementing the prefab settings solution from my first point) - all NGUI settings are saved to the editor prefs file which is a local file on the machine registry. This means that it is outwith the control of any version control system in use - so if I change a setting on my machine it will not be shared with the other people working on the project. This is a massive flaw in the system, that makes changing NGUI settings when working in a team almost impossible.

If these things could be looked at for future versions it would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance guys.

[ArenMook]

All these changes are meant to be local -- set by the developer based on what he's working with. I would find it annoying as hell if every time I pulled an update my settings changed. What if it's a multi-atlas project, and I happen to be working with one atlas, while my teammate is working with another one, and every time I update it would switch my atlas to his, or his atlas to mine? Or alter my settings with his? That would be irritating at best.

The atlas properties you're referring to are not atlas properties at all. They're atlas maker settings. Atlas maker is the tool that creates the atlases. It's an editor-only tool.

[Morgenstern]

No, you're missing my point. We ARE working on a multi-atlas project, with multiple users. If I open an atlas someone else has made I need it to preserve their settings rather than overwriting them with mine. One atlas may need to trim white space, for example, and if I open it up to make some unrelated changes (such as adding a new sprite) I might wind up turning this setting off without realising it.

Until we discovered that the setting in the atlas maker were global the whole team had assumed they were set on a per-atlas basis, which makes sense given that different atlases may need to have different settings.

[Nicki]

It might be nice to have the UIAtlas save a little editor only settings snippet that the atlas maker could default to when you select that atlas; it would add a tiny overhead to Atlases, but not really anything significant.