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EZGUI - Reviews or Customer experiences?

Discussion in 'Assets and Asset Store' started by Rajmahal, Sep 30, 2011.

  1. Rajmahal

    Rajmahal

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    Hi guys,

    I'm thinking of picking up EZGUI to add some extra polish to my first game project. However, it's a good chunk of change and I wanted to get feedback from those who've purchased as to whether it was useful for them and if they felt it was worth the cost? Is it a relatively easy tool to use?

    thanks,
     
  2. Lypheus

    Lypheus

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    I've heard good things in the past, no personal experience with it however. Just wanted to point out that Unity3D 3.5 is just over the horizon and has a new gui framework, might be something to consider.
     
  3. handsomePATT

    handsomePATT

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    I absolutely love it. The sliding menus and panels make it so easy to make a sick looking GUI. If you only need simple things like buttons and dont want to use the Unity GUI, its not worth it. But if you want to make really complex GUI's its a huge timesaver.
     
  4. dgutierrezpalma

    dgutierrezpalma

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    I'm a happy customer who has used EZGUI + SpriteManager2 in several projects. However, if you are not in a hurry, I would save the money and wait until the Unity 3.5 release. If the new GUI system isn't good enough, you can always purchase EZGUI later... but if you purchase it now, you can regret if the new Unity GUI is really good.
     
  5. Rajmahal

    Rajmahal

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    That's really helpful ... does 3.5 have a set release date?
     
  6. g00niebird

    g00niebird

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    "before 2012" is what I've heard :)
     
  7. niosop2

    niosop2

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    Does 3.5 have a new GUI framework? It wasn't listed in the keynote, so maybe it didn't make it in. Anyways EZGUI is great, so if you have a pressing need for a GUI system, you can't go wrong by buying it. If you don't need something right now, then you could probably wait and see what 3.5 offers in that regard.
     
  8. Eiznek

    Eiznek

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    http://blogs.unity3d.com/2011/06/16/unity-roadmap-2011/

     
  9. WonkyWooGames

    WonkyWooGames

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    I have both EZGUI and SM2, excellent product and support.
     
  10. kablammyman

    kablammyman

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    we use it at here at my job. My boss is more art oriented and loves it, while I'm a programmer, and i avoid using it.Its not terrible, but it wasnt as easy to just pick up and run with it IMO.

    I may change my opinion if i could find an api document or something so I can see how things should work. No, i dont want to watch the tutorial video, i want to LOOK UP what functions/structs/classes do what, and how they interact.

    With the new unity gui coming out, i wonder if ezgui will still be used in the future?
     
  11. lilymontoute

    lilymontoute

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    There is a scripting reference available for EZGUI - It should come with the package.
     
  12. ArenMook

    ArenMook

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    From a programmer's perspective EZGUI is disappointing. It's too complicated for its own good, and their hierarchy is terrible. It also adds ~600 KB to your iOS builds, so if you're trying to keep your game under the 20 meg limit, keep this in mind. Its atlases can be a pain to manage, and the lack of 9-slicing widget support means your atlases will get big, fast.

    We used EZGUI for 2 of our projects at work and ended up creating a better (smaller, faster, easier) system in the end due to the issues I mentioned.
     
  13. crafTDev

    crafTDev

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    It's been a great tool for me so far...but it does have it's shortcomings...no auto atlas rebuilder (which is more of an SM2 thing but i bought both and they play well together) if you make changes to a sprite, sometimes becomes a pain to manage because of that if you are not paying attention, confusing when it comes to dealing with prefabs...some batching problems(which might be because of unity)...

    I've created a wonderful HUD though and look forward to working with it alot, plus updates are always coming, so im happy with my purchase... :)

    EDIT: also you could see the progress i made with HUD in the WIP thread that's in my signature...
     
    Last edited: Oct 3, 2011
  14. Arowx

    Arowx

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    I think it's great compared to the performance of the in built in GUI system, but it could have been made so much easier to use with a bit more work on it's own in ide UI and a library of default prefabs.

    I have also noticed that it can produce significant performance hits if used in game, especially the SpriteText class, for example to lose 2ms to update an FPS counter string ("FPS: 000.0") is crazy slow when your trying to get 60 fps (<15ms frame). So if you use it ensure you setup a way to prevent multiple text changes in the same frame, also run the profiler on it and you will quickly see the there are a number of low level optimisations that can speed up the inner workings a bit (hint: uvs, v+v).

    I'm still tweaking more performance out of SpriteText, the next big hit is its use of a Dictionary<int>,<int> lookup of chars, if I convert this to an array it should be way faster but heavier in memory usage.
     
    Last edited: Oct 4, 2011
  15. ArenMook

    ArenMook

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    Forgot to mention, you can create your own UI system with minimal effort if you're a dev. UI system in http://www.nextrevision.com/sg/ uses a very simple 3D UI system, and actually batches the geometry automatically into a single mesh instead of relying on Unity's dynamic batching like EZGUI, for example.
     
  16. runonthespot

    runonthespot

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    @Arowx et al, you should look at MessageManager - by Little Angel - quite a neat spritetext manager class for EZGui.
     
  17. Rafes

    Rafes

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    EZGUI and the support have been awesome. One of the reasons it will still make sense even if Unity comes out with something new and wonderful, is that it is entirely in 3D space. It is so much more flexible (and i can be so much more creative) because of this. You can really do anything you can do with other objects in 3D. For example, it takes about 30seconds to make an object a button and report clicks and you can tie in to all this with your own code via delegates. There is a little bit of a learning curve to get going, but once you see the flow, it is pretty easy to build up a complex interface quickly.

    There will be pros and cons to any system and each game has different needs. For us, the 3D sprite-based approach is a perfect fit. This may not be true for everyone. Still, we use it for so many things it would be hard to imagine not having it.

    The performance has been fine so far. He built it originally for mobile games on the 3G and older I believe, right? That is the point... it reduces draw calls, which isn't as much an issue with non-mobile platforms. Which reminds, me, this makes layering elements so easy i haven't even had to think about it. +drag&drop, scoll lists, 3D buttons, etc, etc, etc...

    As far as i know, EZGUI has this. I have read discussions and plan to use it for something very soon.

    I thought a Dictionary was extremely fast. I would need to see some conclusive tests to believe you would see an improvement switching to arrays (and more complex to work with in many cases), but I don't want to hijack the thread with this.
     
  18. ArenMook

    ArenMook

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    Rafes, can you point me to a forum link with EZGUI's 9-sliced widget support? I dont see anything in the package.
     
  19. niosop2

    niosop2

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  20. ArenMook

    ArenMook

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    Ah, that explains it. Thanks!
     
  21. Rafes

    Rafes

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  22. moctezumagames

    moctezumagames

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    EZGUI is not perfect, but Unity GUI is S***.
    Thanks to EZGUI we can make games for iOS with a decent HUD. So it's worth the money just because it's a must have for Unity development, and saves a lot of coding time.
    Support is great and it's always evolving. Recommended.

    For Unity people: Stop adding "cool" stuff like lightmapping tools or tree generators and add "basic" tools like scaleform.
     
  23. Rafes

    Rafes

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  24. Arowx

    Arowx

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    It is way faster than a list, but if you look at how SpriteText works when you change a character in your text it uses a dictionary lookup for every character, then does all the calculations again to size and create the meshes!

    Ideally it would cache created character meshes and just reuse them or build up a full set of character meshes and copy them where needed, and use an array to get them as array access is way faster than Dictionary.

    Message Manager sounds good although it is a bit overkill for my current needs, does it run really fast and work well with small fast updating strings?
     
  25. Rafes

    Rafes

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    OT:
    When I clicked that link there was a big banner saying "...Unity Integration", lol... Did you know?
    http://www.scaleform.com/unity
     
  26. psyclone

    psyclone

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    Wonder if that is what Unity is working on..... but however it would be an awesome addition to the unity Toolkit, regardless it is an extension or built-in.
     
  27. Tim Hays

    Tim Hays

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    May 8, 2010
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    Have you seen this before?

    Assets/Plugins/Sprite Scripts/Sprite.cs(19,14): error CS0534: `Sprite' does not implement inherited abstract member `SpriteBase.AddToAnimatedList()'

    Assets/Plugins/Sprite Scripts/Sprite.cs(19,14): error CS0534: `Sprite' does not implement inherited abstract member `SpriteBase.RemoveFromAnimatedList()'

    This happened after I upgraded to EZGUI 1.075 in my game project that was previously working/compiling, but not yet using EZGUI elements.
    My project also has SpriteManager2 installed, but I'm not sure which version. Not sure if it matters, but I'm also using ex2d for my in-game text.

    Thanks in advance for your time!
    -Tim

    Edit: Although, I've only tested it with one project, the problem appears to be fixed when I upgraded to the latest SpriteManager2 as well.
     
    Last edited: Nov 7, 2011
  28. moctezumagames

    moctezumagames

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    I didn't know! good news, I cross fingers to see scaleform in Unity before Unity 6.2 comes out.