(!!!) Improving NGUI: Voice your opinion

[N3uRo]

- I want to see a "circle" type clipping on UIPanel. We have one done by ourself but everytime you update NGUI we have to edit two or three scripts adding that...

- Same with UIGrid pivot option. We have done it by ourself and in this case it's worse because we had to copy all your code and replace it overriding Reposition method with "new" word. Also, it would be nice to be able to extend it and animate each child position with iTween/HOTween/etc...

- UIGrid Reposition() 100% reliable. I have seen sometimes that I have to do a Coroutine and WaitForEndOfFrame because if not, It doesn't give correct child transforms.

- UIGrid sort order Ascending/Descending. It's really easy to implement.

- I would like to see a generic script that handles all NGUI events with the new inspector (see UISlider OnValueChange, for example). This could replace UIButtonMessage.

- A better Tween control. I don't like relying on the component state. I would like to control them with Play, Pause, Stop and so on... methods.

If you guys want me to make certain things public / protected, just ask.  Another user has done exactly that yesterday, and the functionality he has requested can be already found exposed in 3.0.6.

We could but I think that it's better if you take NGUI scripts one by one (every day 4 or 5, when you have time) and change to "protected virtual" all methods that you think that it's worth of extending.

I said that because If we are saying "method X from script X" and later another, you are going to expose one in 3.0.7 another in 3.0.8 and so on...

Anchoring / stretch system is scheduled for a re-design in 3.0.7.

Can you explain this or give a screenshot/example? I'm really curious 

[ArenMook]

I will once I implement it

[DarkMagicCK]

For me, I would send a feature request for a image-ratio-button. Think about tabcontrol's tab button. In game, we often need a panel which has its tab control switch between different panels. The button in the tab control has five states instead of ImageButton's four, additional a selected state. The selected button will be stay on Selected State, while the ImageButton cannot do things like this.

And one more sliced sprite render option - allow the middle part not only stretch, but also tiled. This can be done by combine sliced sprite for head&tail and a tiled sprite for the middle, but I think it's more convenient to use just one sprite instead.

And about panel alpha - we usually need a function for a whole panel's fade in/out, but the nested child panel will not be affected by its parent UIPanel's alpha. I think child UIPanel's render alpha should be inherited from it's ancestor until the root. (eg. panel with alpha 1, a father panel(alpha 0.5), a grandfather panel(alpha 0.5) should result be rendered with alpha 0.5*0.5*1 = 0.25).

[ArenMook]

Panel alpha not being nested... whoa now. I could have sworn I've done that ~10 months ago... I guess it was uGUI that I did this in instead. I'll patch it in.

Edit: The latest 3.0.6 now has properly cumulative alpha.

[Wahooney]

I'd love to see:

• Change pivots to 2 normalized floats, ie. middle center = 0.0f, 0.0f, middle left = -1.0f, 0.0f, middle right = 1.0f, 0.0f, etc.
• A built-in method of using a mesh that is slotted into the ui render pipeline, kind of like UITexture, but with our own mesh too. UIMeshRenderer?

More most likely to follow

[KeithT]

Still on 2.x, so 3 might already have improved some of these:

1. Depth positioning Ahhhhhh
2. Some sort of master/template/skin mechanism so you can create, modify and consistently maintain things of a type e.g. all 35 buttons are the same design
3. The way different inputs in UICamera are handled. The inability to differentiate between mouse and keyboard input is a nightmare, we have had to do some horrible hacks to make popup lists work with just the keyboard, just the mouse and a combination of mouse and keyboard, which is the real situation for the billions of PCs out there.

[gyd]

1. Camera Limit in Rect:
   in order to design some UI for ipad*/iphone5, base on iphone4 resolution, we need to limit the viewRect, and ensure the anchor follow the rule.
   for example, the UI design for iphone4 shows with black blocks at left/right on iphone5 , and black blocks at top/bottom on ipad*, every anchor work fine to match new limit( match screen as default), and every UI out of limit will be cutoff, to make sure Widgets are hided after tween or moved

2. Tooltip in TouchDevices
   of course we can do it on our own, but it will be perfect if tooltips shows when matching some conditions, ex: pressed 1 seconds without moving( or admit a bit movement )

[indiefreaks]

Sprite base collider/trigger : Sometimes, you want to be creative with your UI and you want to create some funky buttons. I'd love to be able to create an optimized polygon shape based on the background sprite to test for the great NGUI event system.
Oh... and it could be generated on the fly :p

Most useful for dynamic radial menus for instance instead of making a custom raycast on the whole menu, you could just have a single pie section generated depending on the number of items presented in the menu.

[breakmachine]

It would be nice to be able to "embed" a dynamic font in an atlas plus making the font pack to rgb. This would make depth managing a bit easier (sorting widgets manually by atlas to reduce drawcalls can be tedious).

Whick makes me think that a function for setting an order for atlases and one for sorting widgets within a panel according to that would be nice too

[Nicki]

One thing that I seem to often stumble into:

There's no easy way to flip a sprite (both horizontally or vertically). This can become annoying if you have a single texture for a corner piece that's identical in all corners, because you either have to mess around with setting scale to -1 on a parent or rotating each piece.

Rotating is not the same as mirroring, so that doesn't always solve that problem. Would be nice with two simple:

[ ] flip vertically
[ ] flip horizontally

on each widget.

[N3uRo]

One thing that I seem to often stumble into:

There's no easy way to flip a sprite (both horizontally or vertically). This can become annoying if you have a single texture for a corner piece that's identical in all corners, because you either have to mess around with setting scale to -1 on a parent or rotating each piece.

Rotating is not the same as mirroring, so that doesn't always solve that problem. Would be nice with two simple:

[ ] flip vertically
[ ] flip horizontally

on each widget.

+1

I use "-1" scale on X o Y Axis because there is no other way.

[Erhune]

I don't have anything new to add, but I just want to add my voice to some previously made suggestions:

Better layout support.

Ex: I want to have a bunch of widgets lined horizontally, each of them with variable width (think UILabel for example), and some spacing between them. I want to center the whole bunch relative to another widget. Bad ASCII drawing:

            [Reference Widget]
[Variable 1]  [Variable 2]  [Variable 3]

There might be a solution with anchors, but when you start to have a variable number of variable-sized widgets, it starts to crumble, so I always find easier to write an ad-hoc script (thank you so much for UIWidget.width in 3.x, by the way, it made my life so much easier!)

Selection support in UIInput.

I use a OnGUI Input() for the chat in my game, because it has proper support of selection, copy&paste, all well integrated with the OS default controls. I would kill to replace those by a proper UIInput, for so many reasons (simplicity, positionning, performance, able to render to texture...)!

Styled text in UILabel.

Basically the subset of pseudo-HTML usable in GUITexts: in addition to colors (which we have now), mixing font styles (italic, bold), sizes... Even better would be: line spacing (I saw you're doing something about this in 3.0.6, but I guess it's one setting for the whole text, not per line/paragraph...), multiple fonts in one label, clickable "links" that send events, or maybe even embedding arbitrary widgets in the text flow...

--

That's all I have for my list to Santa Claus for this year :p Anyway thank you again for your work and listening to the community, and keep up on the excellent work! (the pace of improvements in 3.x is fantastic!)

[ArenMook]

Better layouting (is that even a word?) support and snapping for widget positioning is the main feature for 3.0.7.

3.0.6 has been the biggest update yet, feature-wise. The downside of making improvements is now I have to make some new videos to go with them!

As others have pointed out many times... NGUI is an uber powerful tool -- but learning it can be a challenge. So my main focus with NGUI 3 updates is to make it as easy to use as possible and to remove as much "wtf?" from it as I can.

[Erhune]

Better layouting (is that even a word?) support and snapping for widget positioning is the main feature for 3.0.7.

Fantastic !

3.0.6 has been the biggest update yet, feature-wise. The downside of making improvements is now I have to make some new videos to go with them!

As others have pointed out many times... NGUI is an uber powerful tool -- but learning it can be a challenge. So my main focus with NGUI 3 updates is to make it as easy to use as possible and to remove as much "wtf?" from it as I can.

Yeah, I admit that even after using NGUI for more than 1 year, I learned a few things I always overlooked from the new docs you posted recently. I think using the forum "wiki-like" with a topic for each feature/widget is a great idea!

[sakurawarskula]

NO MORE FANCY FEATURES,FIXED KNOWN BUGS PLS.
Otherwise,we got no steady version to use after each upgrade.
                      --------- a paid NGUI user