NGUI Vs New Unity GUI

[SketchWork]

Hi guys,

We purchased NGUI a while back and are very happy with it but I was wondering how NGUI will compare to the new GUI that Unity are working on?

Cheers,

Justin

[ArenMook]

Until the Unity's UI is released as a preview, no one will know for sure.

[RandomGuy]

The New Unity Gui has been coming for like 2 years , ill believe it when I see it .

[Rafe]

I doubt it will be sprite-based anyway. For a lot of games, having no distinction between 3D behaviors and a 2D GUI layer is a big advantage.

[Syllus]

They do a live demo of the new GUI system in the Unite 2012 keynote speech video.  http://www.tasharen.com/forum/index.php?topic=1591.0 (Forward to 1:02:12 for the new gui segment)

To be honest it looks pretty sweet, and the automatic integration to the new editor animation stuff is going to be pretty sexy as well.  However with that being said it most certainly does not appear to be using sprites or atlases at all and unless they have come up with some stellar way to keep draw calls and performance hits to a minimum for mobile development, I am pretty sure that we will continue using NGUI, even after this is out.  However, like Aren said, until it is actually in our hands it is hard to tell.  The only thing i know for certain is that NGUI is hands down the best solution available at the moment and will undoubtedly be a strong contender even after 4.0 and the new GUI systems are released!  (IF it ever gets released... that kind of has to happen before any of this is even an issue and so far that particular bit of joy has not had a good track record lol)

[Masaaki]

Actually, their blog post states that it DOES use Atlases. Your images are apparently auto-packed into a texture atlas, which should dramatically reduce draw calls. There were a few other things they talked about as well.
However, until Unity 4's new GUI is out (c'mon guys, you promised us a new GUI system back at 3.0, now we're at version 4 and it's still being worked on, wtf happened?), I think NGUI is going to be the standard.

[Nicki]

@masaaki seeing as ArenMook just got hired by Unity to work on the GUI, I dare say it might actually get done.

The only thing I'm gonna miss from NGUI to that will be the super quick turnaround on bug reporting to Aren actually fixing it, since Unity updates quite a bit slower than the NGUI plugin... In a way, I hope they will release the "new gui" in the asset store for free so they can update it more often when needed, without having to update all of Unity.

[RandomGuy]

NGUI is something that's well tested and has been out for a very long time .
New Unity GUI is right now a promise by Unity to maybe get something done by the end of 4.xx . You can't hold off like that though ...

[nah0y]

In a way, I hope they will release the "new gui" in the asset store for free so they can update it more often when needed, without having to update all of Unity.

+1, that would be the best solution.

[ArenMook]

Doing it that way, while possible, makes it a lot more difficult to make it perform well. One of the slowdowns with NGUI comes from the fact that filling vertex data is slow. Arrays have to be created in C#, then passed over to C++, which then get passed to the hardware. If the arrays were created in the C++ side and passed to the hardware, this process would be much faster.

[nah0y]

Did you reply on the wrong thread ? Cause I can't see the link lol.

[dlewis]

Did you reply on the wrong thread ? Cause I can't see the link lol.

He is basically saying that the new Unity GUI is more than just a plugin, it makes changes to the core unity of how it renders GUI (for the new one, the old will still be there for compatibility I assume).

[nah0y]

lol I didn't see it like that at first

[Nicki]

Ah, that makes sense. Still, it would be nice to have some sort of "more often than regular updates" for the GUI, since that has worked so well for NGUI.