(!!!) Improving NGUI: Voice your opinion

[voncarp]

I've been using NGUI for nearly two years.  What direction do you think users should go?  Packages like NGUI take quite a bit of time to get familiar with.  It sounds like because of your contract, your limited in what improvements you can do for NGUI. 

Should long time users brace for Unity's next GUI or continue to add NGUI to our projects?

Since your involved in improving Unity's GUI what do you suggest we do?  Which one is better?  Which one will be better next year?  I've found it very inefficient to implement several different GUI solutions for a project.

Like many others, I am huge fan of NGUI.  I've spent countless hours working and learning from it.  However, it seems like your hands are tied.  As odd as it seems, Unity's new GUI seems like a competitor and your tasked with making the competitors GUI more efficient.  If your unable to further grow and expand NGUI because of your contract limitations, it almost seems like all NGUI users will eventually be forced to convert over to Unity's new GUI.

You seem to be in a difficult situation trying to balance your responsibilities to Unity and NGUI.  But, your longtime users now have this cloud of uncertainty on whether there is a sustainable future for NGUI in our future projects.  Is there a best before date now attached with NGUI?   How about HUD text?  Is that going to be usable with Unity's new GUI?

We are going to continue to make games regardless.  But, since you have direction of Unity's GUI and knowledge of the future of whats in store for NGUI, what GUI should we implement in our games to come?

[ArenMook]

I don't work at Unity anymore, so I am not limited in any way. I was in Unity for 13 months, helped with the UI system, and then parted ways. My interest lies more in game dev than tool dev, even though I seem to be fairly successful in the latter. I am not a big fan of large teams/companies in general, although I have to admit people at Unity were pretty amazing, and it's a fantastic company to work for.

I plan on re-starting Windward's development in a few days, turning it into a completely different game in the process, and developing NGUI and TNet along the way.

[amaranth]

Unity 2D's atlassing system is completely useless in 4.3 as it's not available to be used properly by scripters.

Unity 4.5 is when it will finally be usable.

Fantastic! Even later is better than never.

[McSwan]

Have the example sprites already extracted so we can quickly build custom atlases. Not a big change but a nice one.

[N3uRo]

I like very much the new layout system but we need:

- The circles that we see in the scene view should be draggable and also mantaining shift or alt it should scale from center (like photoshop).

- The UIWidget aspect ratio should have a cropping option (I think that it's only possible for UITexture moving UVs, UISprites it's impossible because they share the same material).

[charmandermon]

I have been using NGUI for 2 years now, I love it.

I have been using DFGUI now for 2 months, I love it.


I really wish in my heart of hearts that you guys would consider working together.  There are some really great features in both systems.  It sucks having to choose.  Will you buy him out and hire him on the team? Please Please Please?

Things I absolutely love about DFGUI are:
The intuitive in scene layout system;
Selected item preferences (makes it feel more like visual studio);
The anchoring system;
Panel system;
A proper focus system (i dont want to mess with the effing z or depth);
A real text input box with real carret that has all the features you would want in a standard text input;
More controls ( like the tab system) (i dont like having to create them from scratch in NGUI and waste many many many hours);



Things I absolutely love about NGUI are:
prebuilt controls with base art(i dont like having to create a new button and assign every freaking sprite every time);





I have one more request that is so needed.  I absolutely can't stand this obsession with data binding, it is a waste of time and always causes issues.  I also hate how events are handled in both ngui and dfgui.  What I would like to see is to be able to uniquely identify a button or label for instance in the inspector with some kind of string id.

Then anytime that button is used it broadcasts its events globally and it doesn't care who is subscribed or listening to the event. And more importantly it doesnt have to have a script on its own item to do something.  This idea is incredibly important for buttons and other items created at runtime.

To listen for the event you would have a method that gets called in any script you want as long as the id of it matches the id on the button. Similar to visual c#

private void Button2_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    // Add code to perform some action here.
}



In all honesty i am not even sure if global message events without being manually hooked up are even possible.

Thanks for your time, keep up the hard work!

[drawmaster77]

I've been using NGUI for some time now. While its great for designing a simple UI, I feel like there is a lot of room for improvement in things like draggable panels and UITable/UIGrid. It's either overly complicated or there are bugs in there. Here are few examples:

• clicking on a scrollbar when all the contents of UIPanel fit on the same page results in NaN exception.
• Cannot use draggable panels within draggable panels (cliping issues?)
• Having to manually call reposition is meh. Sometimes I am not sure if I called it too early or something because items aren't positioned properly
• Using nested UITable/UIGrid seems to cause further problems (I am not sure if that;s supported)
• New anchoring system is awesome, but it sometimes also causes NaN exceptions with anchored scrollbars.

These are just few things that come to my mind at the moment. Otherwise its a great gui system.

[wom]

Support for 3D object clipping in scroll views.
It keeps coming up in the support forum and you usually tell people to use a render texture.  But often you also suggest that people can write their own 3d clipping shader using yours as a starting point.

How about at least including a simple diffuse/unlit shader that supports clipping 3D meshes?
I reckon it would make for some cool possibilities, like using a large cylinder inside a scrollview to implement a circular scrolling list - that kind of stuff.
I guess the input system would need to know about the objects if I wanted drag to work with it.. though you could work around it be just sticking a rectangle behind objects to drag/rotate them.

[Lotti]

please please please please change your private variable to protected!

E.G.: i can't extend the label to add custom effects because all instance variable are private! so i have to duplicate code and update it by myself when a new release is out.

thank you!

[closcan]

An integrated playmaker support!
That's a top list wish!!!

[N3uRo]

please please please please change your private variable to protected!

E.G.: i can't extend the label to add custom effects because all instance variable are private! so i have to duplicate code and update it by myself when a new release is out.

thank you!

+10000

It's common sense...

You need to make your classes extendable...

[3d03]

Please add "number of current step" field to UISlider. I have tried to implement this info by myself, but there is problem in converting float types to int:


float step = 1f / slider.numberOfSteps;
numberOfCurrentStep = (int) (slider.value / step);


it will work but generates wrong results, in some cases it pass some numbers. I mean that sometimes value goes like   1,2,3,4,6 (if numberOfSteps is 6).

Sorry for my english

[Nezabyte]

- Max characters per line for a UILabel

- Build-in support for tooltips to stay on the screen. I managed to achieve this by copying some code from the draggable object script, though it's slightly wonky for some reason.

- Resolved this with a derived UITooltip but would be nice if it was already built-in - if the game object it's hovering over suddenly gets disabled or destroyed, make the tooltip disappear as well. For example, I hovered over an item in inventory to view tooltip and pressed "I" on my keyboard to quit the inventory screen (panel gets disabled). the tooltip stays at the exact spot and is visible until I try to hover over a different game object that triggers the tooltip.

- A way to terminate the OnDrag event after it starts. for example, I have a ship hardpoint with equipment that I allow the user to switch out with other equipment, but I disallow the user from taking the equipment out. with my current implementation, I'm able to prevent the user from moving it, but the error sound plays continuously until I stop dragging my mouse around with left-button held down.

- In the quest log example, I noticed the text shrinks away via scaling when you collapse a quest title. would love the option of it just rolling back in and having the text clipped instead.

- A tutorial video dedicated to tweening tips and tricks. one thing I'll be implementing at some point is tweening icons within a grid (e.g. status effects). I'm imagining it'll involve a combination of tween scale, position, and perhaps alpha (icons quickly appear and slide into their grid positions).

[Wahooney]

Improved text markup scope, we already have colour, but it would be cool it we also had:

* Text size
* Effect/gradient markup, ie. Only add an outline to certain words in a sentence
* Bold, Italic, etc.

At a stretch:
* Font face

[ArenMook]

You can already have bold, italic, underline, strike-through as well as sup/subscript. Check the UILabel documentation.