Noesis is quite an inspiration

[wallabie]

I downloaded a trial Noesis GUI that's on sale at the moment and fell over because the amount of built-in components are mind boggling.  It has basically everything that one would ever need to build any kind of complex GUI without having to build everything from scratch.  To do this in NGUI will take quite some time and money.   Quite good performance on mobile, only problem is that it doesn't support web player.   The reason I mention Noesis so that the NGUI community can see what to expect from a current state of the art GUI system is about.  All of the basic components are there,  drop in an use.  If needing customization, then XAML designer can be used.  Perhaps the new Unity GUI can take some tips from Noesis.

[ArenMook]

This is not in any way related to support. Moving it to Dev cave.

[Nicki]

Would be an interesting excercise to sit down and rebuild all those pre-defined components; and see where the strengths&weaknesses are.

[wallabie]

Most definitely.  I wanted to point out that we are at year 2014 and do not need to "find the thing that is attached to what's called and axle".  Unity's philosophy has always been Maximum productivity for the developers.  They made a big blunder with the GUI system, and NGUI found a niche.  But realistically, NGUI is quite bare bones.  It's been in development for 2+ years and even the last year with much input from Unity itself.  We now see the unity GUI scene catching up to circa 2014 and we no longer should be concerned with Building a Tree component from scratch when we are paying $95 per user.  At 10,000 users this is $950,000.  Not small change for a GUI system that to this day still requires us to buy more add-on. 

Additionally, Unity asset store is in very big Conflict of interest with the development of the Engine itself.  The reason is that for every missing feature in the engine, there is potential business for the asset store.  Some people say that the asset store doesn't make much.  Let's look at the numbers.  Apple makes 20% from it's hardware sales and it is a well known fact that this is a very profitable figure.  Unity on the other hand makes 30% from the asset store, the difference is that Unity doesn't have to make anything and even the support is handled by the developer.   A package like NGUI which has been in the top grossing list for the past 2 years means that Unity has made a considerable amount just on NGUI not to mention Daikon, etc.  We have already seen the push by Unity to increase business in the Asset store is getting more and more.

As indie developers and paying customers, we have more patience than most people and we are willing to put up with beta products that ordinary consumers would normally never buy.  However, at some point, we have to be better at discerning what is good value and what is Great Value.  This  helps to raise the quality of the packages to the level they should be.  Come on, at $950,000 gross for NGUI, well, we should at least get more built-in components.  If there isn't enough time for one person to handle, well, hire another person.

[ArenMook]

I once felt like this with another product -- Unity's OnGUI / EZGUI. I felt both systems had their strengths, but also left something to be desired. Only I didn't complain on a forum or compare apples to oranges. I simply sat down and filled the gap myself, offering it for others to use as well. And then people liked it and started paying me money because the $95 investment saved them a lot more money than rolling their own solution. And despite 30% Unity cut and 42% taxes, I still was earning enough to keep it as a full time job. I disliked it, as I'm a game developer and supporting a GUI solution was never my idea of a good job, but I did it nonetheless.

Some day another enterprising individual will come along and write another system, or will simply create a lot of "built-in components" for other people to use, and put up a new package on the Asset Store. And they too will make money.

That's the development cycle, and it will go on with or without me.

[Nicki]

I think you're mixing Unity in too closely with NGUI here.

As for your comparison with Apple, they also make 30 %, so it's clear that their primary income is from the App Store - hardware is just a conveyour of apps.

You can argue that unity has a bit of a conflict of interest, but their development is faster than it ever was - back in the day, less new stuff just happened. Would you really want a new unity every year? Those aren't either free, you know.

Maximum Productivity is a two edged sword - some people will always need more control, while other just want to be able to put stuff on the screen quick. Compare a raw html editor with Frontpage. To me, it sounds like Noesis is closer to Frontpage, but in all honesty I haven't tried it out properly yet as I don't have time while working on our current project. Bear in mind that Noesis also costs $250  ($87 on the current sale), while NGUI costs $95 - do you get more than double value? Maybe, but that's for you as a consumer to decide. Do you get full source code? I don't think so. You also have to run external plugins to show anything in unity with it, it seems. This may be worth it, but I'm not sure it would be for me.

Value is determined by the people buying it.

I have no doubt that whatever unity ends up making, will be out run by something on the asset store, just because people there have much faster turn around time. Same that happened with GUITexture/GUIText and NGUI.

[wallabie]

@ArenMook,

I agree that Unity has created lots of opportunities for enterprising developers to make a good living from the asset store.  You took the right approach and created a successful solution for others to use.  One thing I have to disagree is that I'm not comparing apples and oranges with NGUI and Noesis. In the eyes of the buyer,   they are both GUI solutions for Unity.   Of course there are differences in pricing and features ( one is $95, the other $270, one is sprite based the other is Vector, etc..  The bottom line is that they both belong to the set of GUI offerings for unity.  Whenever someone needs a GUI,  Noesis and NGUI are in the GUI comparison matrix.  In regards to complaining, I am making a point that NGUI came at a time when there were very little competition in the GUI market, times have now changed and to illustrate this point,   Noesis  was used as a comparison, we can also include Daikon. 

I know that you are first and foremost  a very good game developer and would not prefer to be supporting a GUI product.  The problem is that that the success of NGUI has created a product and business entity in itself.  As a product, it can be compared with other products in its category and what it has to offer.  In my opinion, NGUI is too bare bones and other products are offering a lot more features.  As for your advice of creating plugins for NGUI or create my own system, my interest is only from a perspective of a customer and do not have this inclination.  This is like someone who buys a car and just wants to drive it, as oppose to a mechanic who buys the car and turn it into a dragster.  In the same way, I want to make games and not write GUI plugins.


@Nicki,

Apple is much smarter, they also make lots on the hardware. "Apple breaks iPhone and iPad sales records in Q1 201, 51 million iPhones and 26 million iPads bring Apple record revenue" http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/27/5350106/apple-q1-2014-earnings

I did mixed Unity and NGUI a bit too tightly.  Perhaps it's because Unity picked up NGUI as their GUI solution. 

A for Unity and the Asset store situation.  First of all I definitely agree that the asset store will always be one step ahead of Unity.  What then would be the implication of this.  For example, let's take the case of FinalIK, it's an amazing IK solution that is far superior to mecanim's IK, or shader forge.   If the unity community ask for these two packages to be included in the engine, what do you think would be the incentive for unity.  At the moment, these assets are making quite a lot of money for Unity, why would they include it for Free in their engine? 

If we step out of the Unity ecosystem and look at UDE or CryEngine, some of these popular paying assets are already included in their engine.  One could argue and say comparing these engines is again apples and oranges because of price or features.  Times are changing quickly, what used to be apples ( only the big league studios) can suddenly become oranges ( engine for the masses).

Another potentially serious side effect of the  asset store is that "Missing Features" of the engine is "Remedied" by outside developers.  Instead of filling the missing features themselves,  Unity is encouraging any developer who can fill the gap to jump in.  This works great for Unity, they don't have to do the work, they make money and the asset maker makes money, it's a win-win situation for both.   

For users of Unity, the story is a bit different.  Upon the discovery of a  missing feature ( there are many), we have to try various packages and buy one that fills the hole.  Great, but this means that for each project, we are becoming more and more dependent on 3rd party plugins, each with it's own way of doing things and with varying degrees of quality and support - most of which are not near as good as NGUI.  The bottom line is that with each missing feature, we pay to fill it and we invite in a new foreign code base that we will have to maintain with the help of the maker or do it ourselves.  I've had bad experiences with assets which have become abandon-ware.

Edit:  Forgot to mention the Source.  This is correct, NGUI offers the source and Noesis doesn't.  This is because Noesis is an engine that parses and renders  XAML - which is a language in its own right and which can be used in conjunction with C#.  So having the Noesis Engine source in C++ is not really necessary in the same way that we do not need Unity's C++ source.   However, the sources for all of the built-in components in XAML together with their C# codes are all available.