Choosing GUI framework for your Unity3D project: EZGUI vs NGUI

Our developer shares his experience of working with both of them. Please rate and comment http://bit.ly/KOlaK5

 

Your developer says that NGUI doesn't have an image button. But it actually does have one. Is there something different about the Ezgui image button?

Anyway, interesting post, i'm sure it will be helpful for people looking for a GUI solution.

 

Glad I bought NGUI for $45

Half the GUI plugins weren't an option for pre-3.5 Unity which I have for the rest of my project. Can't even buy them off the store if I wanted.

 

Oh, you're definitely right, NGUI has an image button, that's my mistake.
Just a small issue with it - it doesn't have a disabled state

 

Yeah I wanted a disabled button state in NGUI too, but luckily it only takes 5 mins to add it in yourself with how modular and simple the scripts are.

EZGUI was good for me, but only up until the point where you needed to change the code yourself, then it becomes a nightmare.

 

Agreed. Totally.

 

Thanks for sharing!

We are using EZGUI and it's not so bad. NGUI wasn't mature yet when we bought it so it was a no-brainer, good to know it became a challenger.

Something to consider too; http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/136083-Unity-3.5.2-Released?p=937303&viewfull=1#post937303

 

thx for the tip, I'm sure Unity will make true exiting UI system, at least because they have a lot of experience from third party addons like NGUI and EZGUI

but at the moment we have to choose, and built-in unity UI is not in my list of competitors =)

 

Thanks for sharing! Good post.

Is EZGUI a bad toolkit? No, it's not. It's powerful and has proven successful on several projects this past year. But it is painful to use. It feels very 'slapped-on' to Unity, especially in the editor. As an example, if you close Unity and Reopen it, the EZGUI panels will be broken - you have to manually remove and re-add them. As another example, it breaks Edit Continue.

Getting started with EZGui was hard. It has no wizards, which makes it hard to learn. As you said in your review, the atlases are a bit tricky, but honestly, the fonts gave me more trouble. Even now, I am still uncertain why some fonts don't work quite as expected.

And the worst part of EZGui? The way you hide/shown panels controls. Especially when the app first starts up! There is no way to specify that a panel is not-visible at startup. You have to manually position panels off-screen, which is a real pain in the butt for multiple resolutions.

It's too late for me to switch now. I know the quirks and can make it dance quite nicely. It is powerful after all. But, I hope Unity will release their UI toolkit soon, so I can spend less time futzing with the UI and more time making games.

Gigi

 

I'm probably one of the first Brady customers ever! I've bought EZGUI when it was at 50$ (lacking today's features of course). I've recently bought NGUI (store madness) but they cannot co-exist in the same project (unless you rename a pile of class names here and there). They both share lots of components names (Unity frameworks support, where are you please?).
I'm not saying either is good or bad, I'm only here to point out that it's extremedly important to buy plugin with sources. Most of the time you need to fix stuff by yourself (already done several times with EZGUI) and having sources will not lock you out (or put at the mercy of the plugin author). On my first project (Dead Strike), I've implemented my own GUI system, which was probably faster than EZGUI and NGUI. Probably due to their nature (only buttons and sprites). Really tight code and small. But yeah, something that i don't like about EZGUI is their Unity/style attachment (being ultra component dependent). I like when simple functionality is shown on the inspector and complex behavior is only accessible through code (instead of showing every single little sh*t on the inspector, makes them look like insanely large for nothing).
I think NGUI have done a great job on that side but still i need to do a real test case scenario with EZGUI vs NGUI (performance wise).
Do anyone have already tried this? I mean, it's good to know how nice they can create GUI objects but what about runtime performance (specially on mobile)? Have you tried to create a very complex interface with, i would like to see some!

 

I myself migrate from EZGui to ex2D and didn't regret it.
It took me 3 full day, but now I'm going 2 times faster and I can concentrate on making game, not fixing things.

 

I didn't work with it, but it seems to be a nice 2D sprite solution
it's just not a UI framework, but maybe a great alternative for sprite manager 2, as soon as its price is significantly lower.

 

Waiting for Unity to finish theirs!
Gigi.

 

"Oh, you're definitely right, NGUI has an image button, that's my mistake.
Just a small issue with it - it doesn't have a disabled state"

It's easy to fix the lack of a disabled state as the image button script is pretty light-weight anyway.

 

We were using EZGUI, but I found that EZGUI's automatic creation of atlases was not terribly intuitive and whenever I had to add something to the UI it was a terrifying experience. We also had to place our UI in prefabs in order for EZGUI to find the UI and re-build the atlases.

nGUI is much better from this point of view and (at the time I swapped) has better support for using different atlases for different resolutions and for anchoring UI to different parts of the screen. EZGUI had started to do some of this.

My only issue with nGUI was that if I don't use the Unity Packer it was exploding with large atlases generating the PNG file, it's otherwise rocks solid for me.