(!!!) Improving NGUI: Voice your opinion

[mvi]

A recent update added support for bitmap fonts to vary their font size. However this means whenever you drag a different bitmap font onto a label it keeps the old font size, so we have to manually put in the new font size. The previous workflow worked really well as we had different sized fonts and all that was needed to change font was a drag and drop, which made font replacement a breeze. It would be nice if the default behaviour was to adopt the new font's default size (maybe only if the current font size matches the previous font, so that people who customise the font size get it preserved, but people that don't get pixel perfect from the drag and drop.) Alternatively, the Label inspector could have a pixel perfect mode and only if that is disabled is customisation of the bitmap font size possible.

[N3uRo]

Labels and word wrap

There are times were it breaks words like this:

"Lorem ipsu
m dolor sit amet"

Could you make configurable? So that it breaks by word or by characters.

Anchoring and aspect ratio

I don't understand why if you set other option than "free" you can change the aspect ratio. I can understand for sliced or tiled sprites but no for UITextures or simple sprites. If I want to adapt to a "container" keeping the original aspect ratio what should I do?

Cropable textures

It would be nice if we could scale and crop UITextures using the new anchoring system. For example a dynamic carousel that has different images of different aspect ratios.

Grid and Table improvements

I think that they are getting away with this anchoring system because they can't use it at all.

Imagine a situation where you want to make a "responsive" grid (4x4) Windows 8 metro style that fills the screen.

Now you have to anchor to the camera using the "custom" option and filling 0-0.25,0.25-0.5,...

It's a pain in the ass doing that and when you want to change it to 5x5 for example...

And also the pivot option that I implemented myself but I want to be in NGUI core.

[makeshiftwings]

A few things that would make my life much easier:

1) When selecting "Unified" anchor, put checkboxes next to Left, Right, Top, Bottom to turn them on or off.  I know you can do it by using Advanced and deleting the object from the fields for the ones you don't want, but that's unintuitive and takes up a lot more inspector space.

2) There should be a way to set a fixed width in scene mode for designing your UI, and not have it automatically move around when you resize the play mode window.  Nothing else in my scene view while in scene mode reacts to me moving or scaling the play mode window, so it's disruptive to have NGUI do it.  Especially since I usually have the play window under the scene window, and enlarging the scene window so that I can have a better view of my GUI has the exact opposite effect because it causes everything to fly off to the sides of the screen in whatever ridiculous aspect ratio the play window is in.

3) We should be able to set the size of a non-clipping panel.  Currently to make something like a window I have to make both a panel and a blank widget and set the size in the widget.  This seems dumb since a panel has its own rect already and just adds more clutter to the hierarchy.  I think for most people, the use case of a panel with some sort of size to it comes up much more than a use case where you need a panel of infinite size.  I guess a simpler way would just be to make a panel a widget.  Is there a reason that a panel is not a widget?  Maybe you could add a "Window" or "Container" class that is basically just a panel-widget, if you need to preserve backwards compatibility for people who need infinite size panels?

[KyleStaves]

I agree with makeshiftwings on his #1 pretty heavily. I make a lot of use of strings that I want to ResizeHeight and anchor to another widget or panel, it feels pretty common and time consuming to set that up and then the anchor inspector looks very cluttered all the time.

I also think it would be super cool if you started to move towards making NGUI more extension friendly overall. I find myself writing more and more reusable extension scripts and NGUI is one of the more time consuming things I do this for. Even simple things like a property drawer for atlas/sprite selection would be an incredibly cool time saver.

1. [UIAtlasDrawer][SerializeField] UIAtlas mAtlas;
2. [UISpriteDrawer][SerializeField] string mSpriteName;
3.  

[Litherad]

The ability for a sliced sprite to wrap around content widgets, for example a textbox or even a collection of widgets of variable sizes (wrapping around their collective bounding box).
Unless the functionality is there and I just can't seem to find it

[lzt120]

I wonder if the Data Binding  is in schedule ?

[LaeusPF]

First off, just wanted to thank you for NGUI. I've been an evangelist for the product for over a year now (my latest shipped game, Echo Prime for iOS and Steam, uses NGUI quite extensively).

Since you asked what makes us rage out, I have to confess that the new right-click intercepting for the context menu drives me absolutely bonkers!! In fact, I moved it to ctrl-right-click in my NGUI source. I always navigate the editor using rclick-hold and WASD, and IMO, a plugin should not take such fundamental editor controls away . Unfortunately, I'm still seeing a performance drop when I have any NGUI object selected and am trying to navigate, so my patch isn't complete. I would love it if this became an NGUI editor option for those who don't mind the disruption.

[makeshiftwings]

A few more headaches with the new anchor system:

- As mentioned above, it should be easier to only anchor to particular sides (top and left) rather than needing to anchor every side.
- To go along with that, if you use Advanced mode and leave some anchors blank, you need to re-enable the widget size controls so we can actually size it.
- Ideally, don't ever disable the widget size controls, and just change the anchors if the user changes the size (maintain anchor based on pivot location) and vice versa.

[Hawkins]

@ArenMook then no chances of CVS support, in the Language component, appear in an update of NGUI? I think I'll have to buy a plugin in AssetStore only for this functionality 

A few pages ago, I gave a feedback on the translation system (post #120), but I think it has no importance.

[ArenMook]

@Hawkins: CVS is a versioning system. I assume you meant CSV, comma separated value file. Yes, it's certainly on the list, and your suggestion was excellent.

@LaeusPF: You could also technically just hit escape to clear the selection from the widget then you can move around freely. RMB being disabled was in part intentional because panning around the UI is rarely something desired. Game objects, certainly... but UI, not so much.

@lzt120: It's actually been there since December (http://www.tasharen.com/ngui/docs/_property_binding_8cs.html), but I haven't finished it as I hesitate to release something without actually using it myself. That's why you don't see it in the standard version.

[Tripwire]

Would it be possible to add the Play Sound script in the attach menu?

NGUI -> Attach -> Play Sound

Would be nice to not have to search for the script every time

[lzt120]

If release the data binding for public, you can improve it more quickly by response from community.As the saying all are saying it  is good it is actually good.

[LaeusPF]

@LaeusPF: You could also technically just hit escape to clear the selection from the widget then you can move around freely. RMB being disabled was in part intentional because panning around the UI is rarely something desired. Game objects, certainly... but UI, not so much.

Thanks for the quick response, though I must respectfully disagree.

It seems to me that navigating a Unity scene is a core flow that should always be predictable, whether I want to examine a generic GameObject or pan across some UIWidgets. Specifically with regard to UI, I often need to get much closer to some UI elements so I can align or scale them precisely, but this is now broken in NGUI. Or I might have some 3D UI elements in the scene and I want to examine the scene's contents without losing my current UI selection. Having to unselect and re-select widgets every time I want to navigate the editor using baseline Unity controls is not a good suggestion.

I could definitely see intercepting right-click if NGUI had a separate "layout editor" or something similar, where it's understood by the user that they're in a special mode.

If this must remain in place, perhaps you could make right-click work like it does in modern OSes where it only traps it if you don't start panning around? i.e., if I right-click and release without moving, it pops up the context menu; if I right-click and hold, it preserves Unity's fundamental control paradigm?

[Hawkins]

@Hawkins: CVS is a versioning system. I assume you meant CSV, comma separated value file. Yes, it's certainly on the list, and your suggestion was excellent.

Is CSV, yes, I apologize for the typo. Well, this is a feature that I expect much in NGUI, almost bought a plugin or moved to another GUI system only because of the support CSV, but like you said it's on the list, I'll wait. Thank you, I can only thank you for keeping this wonderful plugin that is NGUI.

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Another suggestion is to be able to attach the size of a sprite to the parent widget. So whenever a Widget or Panel is resized, the size of the sprite inside it will increase or decrease in size. I find it very useful to anyone who creates Menu or HUD using a sprite as background, and have to be changing the size of the Widget/Panel and then the size of the sprite.

[ArenMook]

@Hawkins: If you anchor the widget to another, it will do just that -- resizing the target widget will also resize the anchored widget. That's how the new layout system works.

@LaeusPF: I can certainly make it an option. The threshold approach likely won't work as the event can be either captured or not at the very beginning, but I'll see what I can do.

@Tripwire: Right-click, Attach, Play Sound Script. -- I will add it to the NGUI menu as well though.