I had to put this somewhere, and well support for NGUI doesn't have to be negative/issues, does it?
I finally made a chat bubble that follows around a character and doesn't look like total turds.
I love it. Resizing the bubble around the text took 2 lines of code. That's it. Having the bubble (and text) follow around the transform was fairly simple.
On top of it all... all the chat bubbles are the same depth, and the UICamera actually draws the last created bubble on top. By default, the behavior is exactly what I wanted.
Previous attempts:
Unity OnGUI: it worked, but performance was terrible and very difficult to customize. I had to write about 200 lines of code to word wrap, then try to determine the size of the text with a guicontent, and modify the size of the bubble. Messy, worked, used OnGUI, hardly ideal.
Unity GUIText with GUITexture bubble: worked somewhat. Trying to have the most recent chat bubble overlay all others didn't quite work, so having it create 'depth' was an issue. Following transforms worked, but resizing stuff was a kludgy mess again.
2DToolKit: So I was like, oh hey, atlases and blah blah. I put a textmesh on top of a sprite and tried having the objects appear in 3D space. It kind of worked. My camera is at a 45 degree angle (2.5D game) so the transparent shader on the text wouldn't register correctly for being in front unless it was some huge amount in front of the bubble (.5 Z, which is a huge amount actually). When people were close to each other and talked, the text from one bubble could be in front of someone else's bubble. I did end up learning a lot about shaders to try and create my own z-depth offset shader, which let me make it 'closer' and made it mostly work, but it looked like complete garbage.
I had spent, not kidding, about 40 hours on this probably.
I finish up current tasks and decide... let's see what I can do for chat bubbles with NGUI. It took me about 20 minutes to get a working version. Ridiculous. I wish I bought NGUI right when I started using Unity; however, I wouldn't be able to realize how much I hate OnGUI (Guitext/guitexture isn't so bad in places.)
Anyhow, I just wanted to say thanks for this awesome product. I like that you continue to develop it, providing more value for the same product everyone is using. I should mention that I have the 2DToolKit and knew he was working on making a UI for it, but just decided to get a more polished product (from much more development time) and paid for NGUI. I don't regret it one bit.
Feel free to archive this/remove it/whatever once you're done reading it. I don't want to clutter up the board, but felt I needed to send you some praise and have everyone else read it too.
