UGUI vs NGUI?

So i made the mistake of jumping on the Daikon Forge GUI bandwagon. It's now time to rip it all out and replace it with another GUI system. I'm used to using NGUI for all my GUI needs (until i tried DF-GUI) but with UGUI being available I'm considering using this. Normally I'd just jump in but the DF-GUI incident has made me wary. I'm wondering how drop down menus are handeled with U-GUI as this is quite a large part of my needs.

So has anyone any experience or feedback of using the UGUI in production or comparing it to NGUI? Any opinions would be appreciated.

Thanks

 

I feel ugui is good for 3d world position UI like combat text, targeting huds etc. ngui work better for complex 2d ui where you have already lot of ready to use widgets with NGUI.
the force of NGUI is all the update, the dev with constant update made a lot of work to simplify everything, you will need to wait a long time for ugui to be as productive. but all theses updates on ngui was a problem for other assets compatibility, every weeks breaking updates makes your assets throw error on import.

now with ugui you have a "correct" gui product that become generic and every other assets will use it instead of ngui.
but anyway you can definitely use both in the same scene.

 

What happened with Daikon Forge? What incident do you mean?

 

They abandoned it & it has a lot of issues. http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/daikon-forge-no-longer-being-sold-in-the-asset-store.260930/

 

Mixing different UI solutions likely causes more problems or required more setup and configuration work than just picking one. Especially if you consider that one uses colliders to find out whether e.g. the mouse is over a UI element, while the other uses a RectTransform without collider.

 

not in the case i enumered combat text and target huds do not need to react on click events

 

We're considering switching to UGUI (from NGUI) when we switch to Unity 5, initial investigation shows it's far easier to integrate dynamically scaling UI's (for on screen questions and messages that re-size with the contents, and localised text areas specifically), particularly with sprites that don't adhere to whatever 'pattern' the code is set up to handle.

We're yet to look into just how easy it is to script with compared to NGUI (tweening, panel management, event handling etc), anyone who has already done anything like this, have you found any drawbacks to UGUI?

 

In some cases there may certainly be no problem at all, but in general it can lead to a lot of issues.

 

I just wish you could use uGUI with Editor/Inspector window GUI scripting (It should be noted in their FAQ that you can't do this... unless you somehow can?)

I'm probably going to continue to use NGUI for the next 3-4 months before switching to uGUI. By then, there will be tons of examples of how to bypass any potential problems with uGUI and the bug bucket will probably smaller.

 

I rewrote my whole Daikon Forge GUI in UGUI over the course of the public beta; I find that I am less productive than I was in DF, but the performance is better. For me, a now gunshy DF user, nothing beats that foreknowledge that the system will always be supported. Thank God. UGUI has no real tweening functions to speak of (the recommended method is to use animation clips), the automatic layout tools aren't super intuitive, and the text rendering is lackluster, but it's perfectly serviceable and bound to improve. To answer one of your unanswered points from the OP, UGUI currently has no drop down lists at all. You would have to create your own or wait for 5.x.

("Wait for 5.x" is becoming a rather haunting refrain!)

 

uGUI. already started porting a 10 GB project from our own GUI solution to uGUI.

 

I didnt like NGUI, UGUI seems good enough

 

UGUI. It's got an entire company behind it and it's open sourced on github, so it's got a real supported future. Even if it's not the best, it's good enough for me to feel secure in getting behind.

 

Yeah, NGUI is good, but UGUI is the one that has official support, and IMHO is better in some aspects.

 

UGUI is awesome!

 

UGUI. I heard that the final version of 4.6 is coming out sometime this week

 

uGUI.

 

uGUI it is then, makes sense really when you consider it's the official built in solution. Just didn't want to jump right in like I did before, once bitten twice shy and all that.

Thanks guys.

 

I can certainly think of at least one way to improve on the text rendering quality in Unity 4.6.




While also giving you a lot more flexibility when it comes to visual styling as well. In this case, we have dynamic outline, bevel, glow, soft shadow as well as animated uv on the face texture.



Just showing the mesh which is still using 2 triangles / quad per character just like Unity's UI Text. The quads are pretty big to accommodate the large offset on the soft shadow. Reveal of the text is done using the TextMeshPro.maxVisibleCharacters which is an int which controls the # of visible characters.

 

Are you telling me there is a gui solution for unity that draws sharp, non blurry text? Can this be integrated in ugui somehow?

 

Yes. The version of TextMesh Pro with support for Unity 4.6 is already available to registered users via the TextMesh Pro User Forum. Here is a video showing support for UI Mask which will be in the next release.

 

stoppppp it's too prettyyyyy i cant take it

 

Great news I already have Textmesh Pro and was waiting for uGUI support. What do i need to do? Register on the forum and send you my invoice number?

 

To register, you will have to supply your invoice #. Once you have registered, just PM with your username and I'll get you access to the latest beta of TextMesh Pro.

 

Does anyone know how well tweening works with uGUI? Or is Mecanim the preferred way for working with animation states?

 

Mecanim way. I've already started custom tweening on uGUI, you should do too IMO

 

I don't mind the occasional heads up from asset authors, specially when the text looks *that* sharp I believe he plans to integrate fully with uGUI which is essential really.

 

Mentioning Unity's text rendering is like rubbing a lamp: @Stephan B will appear!

 

That's the current situation. But after the 4.6 release this week, the text rendering has a high priority for the UI team. We can look forward to a better built-in solution.

 

Me too. So, do not make another with an third party. uGUI of course.

 

I missed that
You should have written it in upper case letters... Bold... all in red

 

That was funny

That is pretty close to reality although I usually only post when the words "fuzzy" "blurry" are also present

 

Thankfully, you also appear when someone mentions ridiculous custom scripting workflows to get SDF atlases with kerning into TextMesh, otherwise I would not have known about TMPro!
</Off-topic>

 

So... what are people's opinions of OnGUI? Is there some major disadvantage to generating your menus from code? I'm sad to see it become so unpopular that it's not even worth mention

 

That may be a little understatement

 

I've read that OnGUI is potentially called several times per frame and has no draw-call batching, so it probably wouldn't be a good candidate for game HUD's, but rather suited for menu and option scenes if one would rather not (yet) use uGUI.

 

Haven't seen this before but it looks really nice. Adding to my notepad-wishlisht

 

Well, that's something at least. Thanks. Most of what I've used it for is menus. I'll consider the new stuff for HUDs.

 

Done!

 

The thought of using Mecanim anywhere near a UI terrifies me.

I've used it for humanoid characters, and can see the clear benefits (and costs) there. But using it for UI, don't you end up with most of the costs (setup work and lack of precise/direct script control) with few of the benefits (as you won't need complex blending or locomotion)?

 

There's nothing stopping you from performing tweening yourself, of course. At the end of the day, it's not that complex. And anything more complicated probably warrants the use of the animation system anyway.

 

There's no question ... it's the new Unity UI. I don't even use the name "uGUI" because it sounds too much like NGUI. The only reason in my book to use NGUI is if you already have the GUI for your project finished and were using NGUI. But personally, I'm removing NGUI from any projects I'm actively working on (except for ScoreFlash, of course ... but the only reason I'm maintaining it there is to not get my customers angry at me ;-) ).

Speaking of which ... I need to make sure I finally get Unity UI support for ScoreFlash up on the store. From now on this will be the default solution, replacing the UnityGUI approach (so this means that within a few days, ScoreFlash will also require Unity 4.6 ;-) ).

 

I'm having problems with TextMesh Pro in Unity 5.2.2

 

UGUI. The problem with it though is that it has very hard to use support for bitmap fonts (you have to set up glyph rects yourself) and the only tool to import bitmap fonts and set up glyph rects automatically that has reasonable price (<$15) isn't working with Littera exported fonts (with AFAIK uses AngelCode's BMFont format, at least for XML exports) :*(.

But otherwise, it's a great UI system, cost-free and unlike old gui I don't feel pressed to buy NGUI or other solution like that because it is lacking in features (3D GUI being one example).

 

Just send me an email or post on the TMP user forum to let me know what issues you are having.

For Unity 5.2, since Unity made significant API changes related to how geometry is handled by the Canvas System, you will need to update to the Unity 5.2 release of TextMesh Pro which is available in the Asset Store as well as the TMP user forum.

 

Yeah the built in UI has come a long way since November last year. Most of this thread isn't that relevant any more. I believe there is even a built in drop down menu now. Which probably means I need to build something else to attract viewers to my YouTube channel.