NGUI developer leaves Unity, New GUI?

Just found out that the NGUI developer Unity hired to write the New GUI no longer works for Unity, does this mean that the New GUI has stalled again?

http://www.tasharen.com/forum/index.php?topic=7567.msg35939#msg35939

 

He didn't work alone on the new GUI. The others can easily continue the work.

 

Hopefully that's true, they hired him for a reason...

 

They could have hired him for the vision and base work. They have the groundwork and most things relating to the GUI are pipe-lined and probably planned out for a while.

 

Or they start from scratch

 

This is the time to hire Takuan Daikon....

 

My guess is his departure had something to do with "creative differences". Making a UI system that satisfies most people is a difficult task, and people have differing opinions as to how that should be done. I don't know a lot about Mr Lyashenko, but he does seem like the type of guy who has his fair share of opinions. And so they parted ways.

 

Delayed to unity 6.x!

 

Source???

 

I think that was a joke.

 

Pretty sure that wasn't a joke!

 

Nope. Delayed until Unity 6.3.

 

source please.

 

Anything to indicate the GUI is due out soon, or is no news good news?

 

No news is never good news, at least with software. I think you should just give up on the new GUI. I gave up already and I don't feel frustrated about the "no news policy" anymore Also, Daikon Forge seems really interesting.

 

Unity just removed that post and are now saying it's delayed to Unity 7.5.

 

They said it was a typo, it's delayed until 8.5.

 

Back in the start of December it looked like the new GUI system was merged with a 4.x release -

https://twitter.com/stramit/status/408526008602484736/photo/1

 

Delayed till unity 5.x - the version that folds your food and cooks your laundry

 

Peeks in and wonders, then dashes away...

 

+1

Of the many GUI frameworks I've purchased, that is the one that has been the quickest and easiest to get up to speed and start producing with.

 

Independent developers are able to create a GUI system better than the company developers.

Epic Fail.

 

Wow didnt the other GUI guy quit as well, then they hired the gui who has the grossing thing in the asset store.

 

I'm not really holding my breath for the new GUI system. I'm using DFGUI, and it's incredible.

I'm sure that once the new GUI is out it will be good and all, but I wouldn't really postpone anything until then .

While it IS worrying that he has left the Unity team, it could be because of many reasons, and I wouldn't worry too much about that. We have no idea why he left, and for all we know the GUI could be finished already, so his contract was done.

 

Duke Nugui Forever...

 

This goes for more than a GUI system, I've seen lighting, LOD / culling, animation systems and whole bunch of stuff on the asset store which is far superior in most ways to the in-built stuff. I hang around Gamedev, there's people building there own engines in about a year and a half and adding there own Vector Based GUI's with XAML and WPF or even widgets and there engines are sweet.. There's members on this forum, who have personally reached out to me with some impressive pieces of technical achievement superior in all sorts of aspects.

The biggest kick isn't that people are doing it, that's expected.. What shocks me is, usually it's not a team who are developing these amazing tools, it's one guy (some not even that experienced, but very talented).

I'm not complaining about Unity, for the most part it's a handy prototype tool. What I'd really like to know and can't fathom for the life of me, what is the real issue? Why are single dev's outshining a massive team in a shorter amounts of time?

I don't want to be rude, I don't want to sound like I'm trying to attack.. I genuinely would like to know why? Does Unity need help? I'm sure many would aid Unity in keeping competitive.. Are they doing something behind the scenes? (I read an article saying they want to compete in the console market) which at a guess will require some heavy re-design of features and tool sets.

 

Being more technically advanced doesn't necessarily indicate better software. If that were true, those people who cranked out superior engines in 1.5 years could just sell their engines and compete with Unity. But they can't because it's hard to make software that many people can use generically. There is an essay in the Mythical Man Month called The Tar Pit, which estimates it takes NINE times longer to develop a generic (exportable) version of a product vs the original version used locally by a team. This number varies some depending on how large or complex the product is.

As for Daikon Forge, you like it (and so do I), but not everyone likes it. Unity has to make a tool that (almost) everyone likes. That's hard. And once they release it, it's hard for them to change it. So they have to get it right the first time.

 

Why would they have thought that hiring someone whose product would become redundant if they did a good job was a good idea?

 

I can't agree with that, starting on the engine part there's an absurd amount of obvious reasons why you wouldn't release an engine commercially. If anything is well designed you can use it generically as well, a GUI system either works or it doesn't, it's either easy to use or it's not and it's either feature complete or it's not. Liking a specific tool? It's whatever get's the job done in the least time with the best possible results.. I've not heard tons of love for Unity's original implementation, so it seems to ring hollow.

If I was to wager a $5.00 bet, I'd put a lot of the issues down to cross platform capabilities.. Apple don't seem to know what there doing from month to month, Unity supports consoles, mobiles, PC's, Mac's, Web.. Only developing for two is bad enough and I'm feeling the pain right now. I don't even think I could comprehend how to keep all these systems, across all these platforms working correctly.. It seems like a man hour pit!.

You have more focused companies like CryTek who have technically much superior tools, in a SPECIFIC area.. If I was to imagine CT taking on all the platforms underneath the sun like Unity has, I'd hazard a guess they'd be in the exact same situation.

The question is why? Why jump through all the hoops to try and support every platform? Do the means justify the cost, especially when it takes years to develop a GUI solution? Then back to the original question, if one man can do it then what exactly is the problem?

Personally I'm not really fussed, but it would be a shame to see Unity loose custom especially in the upcoming new era of engines.

 

Your argument sound nice, but it's not in line with what we see. If it were easy to make engines and UI libraries generic, the market would be flooded with them. For engines, Unity is really the only generic, reusable engine out there. Unreal is somewhat reusable (version 4 will probably be better). Crytech is also somewhat reusable.

On the UI side, take a look at Scaleform. It's technically advanced, but basically what you get is a well-optimized flash rendering engine and good integration support. Every company has to build their own workflow around it. That's right, the guys at Scaleform, who have been working on it for 10 years, can't deliver a generic UI system that EVERYBODY likes. It's hard. And likely they just gave up and won't even try.

 

Did you skip past the second portion about cross compatibility? Who is We? Also where did I say it's easy?

Unity has a very large team though, whilst difficult neither should it be that hard to make something like NGUI!!

On the engine side, there's tons of open source equivalents.. Which you can modify until your hearts content, which comes at a cost of cross compatibility (Well unless you build it in) and it's hard and time consuming.

Also why do you believe CE and UDK is only somewhat re-usable?

Scaleform is an entity within itself, I hope something replaces it one day!.

 

If they just wanted to release something of equivalent quality to NGUI, they could probably do that pretty easily. But remember not everyone likes NGUI, so they need something more people will like. On top of that, lots of people have high expectations for it. And once it's out, it's out. There's no going back.

The idea of generic software is that you DON'T have to hack it to meet your needs. It works more-or-less well out-of-the-box. It doesn't mean those open source libraries aren't useful, but can you imagine if Unity released the new UI and said: "Hey guys, here's the source code. Feel free to hack it to do what you want!" I'm sure that would go over well.

I haven't used them much so I'm just going off what I've heard and seen. I've heard people say Unreal has a monolithic class structure that's not as flexible as Unity's component system. From what I've seen, Unity / Crytech games tend to be first-person type games, though that's not always true.

Yeah, hopefully Scaleform will be phased out to something new. I'm not a huge fan of flash myself.

 

This is sadly not an argument at all. Maybe Unity is trying to please his audience, but I CAN'T believe that's the reason for the delay. There are things Unity-Users don't like about the engine today, just have a look at the Support/Gossip-Forums. There are enough posts like "XXX is missing" , "Why isn't there an option to XXX"
If Unity wanted us all to like their stuff, why did the deliver back then the Unity GUI? Not quite the holy grail, isn't it ?

 

they should fix 4.3 first then worry about GUI later....just saying

 

All Unityusers prefer to use NGUI and DFGUI compared to the actual GUI system

The actual GUI system is not a way to make a GUI, is the worst way to do it

 

All you guys would have handled your custom ui needs for a game within the amount of time bitching about Unity's GUI. I've done 4 games in Unity so far with UI's written from scratch. It takes roughly 2-3 weeks to do, and isn't any different than programming behaviour for the game.

Stramit's tweet indicated Unity has something planned possibly for 4.4 - and you're still moaning about it or conjuring up gossip. I understand it's fun but it's not practical

In fact it's posts like this which indicate to me that Unity shouldn't have a gui beyond a simple set of debug tools, but instead optimise and open up the core engine a little more so that Asset Store really can plug these problems. Is a GUI really the domain of a game engine? I think it's so specific, so creatively unique that it's really the domain of middleware.

 

Hippo I think you hit it on the head. I think many may be confused by the term middleware however. In some circles, Unity itself is middleware.

I'm actually making my game with little interaction "as possible" for a traditional GUI, as the game itself is the 3D GUI. I needed to make that decision early on so am not going to fret about future developments any more.

 

Having NGUI and DFGUI is better than nothing, and they are not expensive.

The real issue for me is that there are lots of plugins in the asset store that are not done using NGUI because understandably they want to avoid external dependencies. So one ends up rewriting the UI for these plugins to make them work with NGUI diminishing their value. The native GUI is just unworkable on mobile.

If NGUI came with Unity, then plugins will start using it, and this means more options.

Learning he left the company sucks, at the very least it means it wont be released as fast as it would have had he stayed there.

 

But then you are limiting yourself to that one specific gui thus rendering all other useless.
That wouldn't be a good thing.

 

Or if the asset store allowed nested assets, or asset dependencies.

 

Come on guys, think about it.

They arent going to rush and deliver builtin additions to the engine. Why would they?

Their primary goal as a business (especially since they have to answer to investors now) is to maximize profits.

It is far more profitable for UT to keep many things out of the engine. Why? They make more money from people buying the addons through the asset store.

Its simple numbers and business.

 

What a whole load of codswallop. A true 3D game engine uses the same basic principles as other engines, anything else is just a toolset bolted on to it.. There isn't a modern 3D game engine that couldn't have the same toolsets bolted on the top as Unity, at the core they either use DX or OpenGL..

What tools you use upon the core engine is up to you, Unreal decided to buy a lot of middleware. So did Unity with Beast and Umbra etc. CE went in the way of developing their own physics and toolsets but use scaleform.

As soon as someone says to me you can't do X game in a decent modern 3D game engine, then something doesn't quite add up.

 

Sure, those tool sets COULD be bolted on, but it's not cheap to do so. Otherwise, the market would be flooded with Unity clones.

 

Wrong post reply.. damn chrome ups user error

 

Unity is doing well for itself, AFAIK. It's not about price or can it be done, because once you have built the core framework around the renderer adding little tools to manipulate on top is usually the simple bit..

The issue in a nutshell, you need to be an experienced coder (many years) to build a game using GL never mind a framework on top of OpenGL, a couple of guys developing an engine for one platform takes one to two years and with UE for the PC market and Unity in the mobile market there's generally not a good reason enough to do so dependant on what you're aiming for. Polishing it up so beginners can use it, now that's an artform and I have to give Kudo's to Unity for that.. Something that CE lacks and to a lesser extent UE..

I could release an engine, whilst fully functional has little to no layers of abstraction for the end User and most people's eyes will glaze over at the huge amount of documentation to do the basics (Even though it can do what Unity can do). Abstraction / cross compatibility and users can be far more complicated than the engine itself..

I'll show you an example, you have to do all this just to get lighting input into the engine I'm developing..
Now this engine supports ambient spherical lattices.. But wouldn't this be a PITA every time you have to set up a light and do some basics?

Code (csharp):

1.      mesh = new Mesh(vertices, indices, true);
2.                 mesh2 = mesh.loadMesh("Car.obj");
3.                
4.                 Transform.setProjection(70f, ShadowWindow.getWidth(), ShadowWindow.getHeight(), 0.1f, 1000);
5.                 Transform.setCamera(camera);
6.                
7.                 Lighting.setAmbientLight(new Vector3f(0.1f,0.1f,0.1f));
8.                 Lighting.setDirectionalLight(new DirectionalLight(new BaseLight(new Vector3f(1,1,1), 0.1f), new Vector3f(1,1,1)));
9.        
10.                 PShader.setPointLight(new PointLight[]{pLight1, pLight2});
11.                 PShader.setSpotLights(new SpotLight[]{sLight1});

Code (csharp):

1.  //transform.setScale(0.7f * sinTemp, 0.7f * sinTemp, 0.7f * sinTemp);
2.                 sLight1.getPointLight().setPosition(camera.getPos());
3.                 sLight1.setDirection(camera.getForward());
4.         }
5.        
6.         public void render()
7.         {
8.                 ShadowUtil.setClearColor(Transform.getCamera().getPos().div(2048f).abs());
9.                 shader.bind();
10.                 shader.updateUniforms(transform.getTransformation(), transform.getProjectedTransformation(), material);
11.                 mesh.draw();
12.                
13.         }
14. }

 

This is what I've been saying all along.

 

The original Unity GUI (immediate mode) was added because they needed something to bootstrap Unity with. Much of Unity's GUI, and most of the tools from the Asset Store, are written in immediate mode. Its implementation is so damn simple, it rarely fails. Even after the new UI's release, it will probably still remain the top choice for making tools, and will always be a solid fallback.

Now today, things have changed a lot. There are now several UIs on the Asset Store: DF, NGui, IGui, Noesis, eDriven and more. This raises the bar significantly. And so many people are talking about it, in this read and others, including the sticky on this forum. Why would they release a UI library they know is inferior to its counterparts?

In this talk, Mr Lyashenko talks about how they had a solution (called retained mode), but they junked it and started over with a new version. If Unity really just wanted to release a new UI, any UI, they would have just released retained mode.

 

I really cant get it..why would people wait for the new GUI?? I mean seriously... , I've been using Immediate mode GUI for over two years and its amazing...you need visualizing editor?? just create the scripts that runs your control ans set it to run in the editor...you need animations?? just use something like main x and main y for the animation and there acc.. you need widgets?? you can do everything with the BeginScrollbar and those stuff...and i already have DataBinding and animation and WYSIWYG mode in my own from scratch written GUI that covers a lot of objects like ComboBox, ListBox, Button, Image, MovieFrames, 3D Implementation... after all...every function happening has event calls that you can do other actions from it.... why wont you start writing your own GUI ??

 

Unity should provide working solutions for general use outside the box, and in special cases people may have to make their own. It's that way with the physics engine, and shadows, the vegetation system, terrain system, etc etc. In a lot of cases, customers are able to provide even better solutions...no shame in that.

Except the huge problem in this case is that the built in UI system is NOT up to par. Most people MUST purchase an alternative.

Honestly, I have already purchased 3 separate systems, NONE of them cheap in my opinion. Not to mention the time investment to integrate things.

And in all this time...I have no idea what the "NEW GUI" will really offer.

Heck, I think my biggest issue is that UT has incredibly bad communication skills. They release pretty much jack for information. People complain about that. When they get a "finished" product, they complain because 1) it took so long, and 2) it doesn't meet expectations because most people are in the dark about what to expect ANYWAY, since UT can't seem to find the ability to communicate.

So then UT gets its feelings hurt, and clams up, making things even worse. So nobody knows what to expect, whether or not the new GUI will meet their needs, how long, etc etc. I don't blame their customers for being frustrated one bit. At times, I almost wonder if UT even likes its customers.