New Unity3D 4.0 GUI

Hi everyone, I was wondering if there is any new news on Unity 4's new GUI system? Is there any estimated release date? Anything?

jSoftApps

 

nope and nope. All we know is that Michael Lyashenko (NGUI creator) is working on it now. I just finished talking to him at GDC about just that topic, and all I could get out of him is this:

"If you like NGUI, then you'll like the new GUI"

 

Somebody should sticky this since it seems like the most asked question.

 

You mean the Unity 5.0 GUI?

 

So Waiting 4.5

 

This . Even when it comes out it wont be production ready for a good time .

 

It will have to be awesome for me to even consider it, because noesis GUI is nearing release and i don't see myself using anything else than that once it's out.

 

noesis doesn't work on Mac...at least from what I've heard so although it looks nice, its kind of pointless if you want to do multiple platforms.

 

Well doesn't matter to me (win /DX11 only) but i can see that being an issue for others, i thought it was limited to not supporting webplayer due to native plugins but are you sure about this? i'm fairly sure it supports opengl.

 

Sorry if I expressed myself poorly. What I meant is that its not supported on Mac (well at least for the first version - from the quote below) not that it couldn't be done like the support for webplayer.

 

oh my, i hope not...

 

Here you go

http://isthenewguioutyet.com

 

(yeah I know, repost, but still making me cry)

 

+1

 

So, is the new gui out yet?

 

-_- : http://isthenewguioutyet.com/

 

Good question, is it?

 

This is probably a rendering issue, can you update your browser and repost once it gives you a yes?

 

Haha, the website is brilliant!

 

I'm still waiting on a functional hasthecommercialforumbeensplityet.com

 

Bookmarked.

 

LOL

 

Awesome

 

It will be a glorious day when http://isthenewguioutyet.com will show a fat and bold

"YES, AT LAST!!!"​

... until that day, as awesome as Unity is, it feels a little "broken" to me.

 

I can't wait for the day they forget to update that site.

 

RSS feed with weekly updates might be handy.

All this sounds like we won't see the new GUI until NGUI stops making profit.

 

I doubt ngui is making that much profit anymore, i assume it's already sold to pretty much anyone who wants it, been around a while now

 

You might want to have a look at the "Top Grossing" category of the Asset Store. This is "overall Top Grossing":



In other words: If NGUI doesn't make a lot of money on the Asset Store, no one does (because at this very moment, not one single package makes more money on the Asset Store than NGUI - could be that publishers that have a lot of smaller packages out there make more, though).

 

It depends on the time frame, i never said ngui doesn't make a lot of money, i said i expect it doesn't do a lot of money "anymore", if this is the totals then it goes perfectly with my suggestion, it made a ton of money, and already sold to pretty much anyone interested, making it top grossing.

NGUI is definately the most used asset by far, but it's not like it came out last week, i don't think there's much of a pool of "oh ok, i never heard about ngui, i'll definately grab it!" users, there may be a few buyers here there (new unity users / the oddball guy who didn't know about ngui etc), but i'd say most of the potential customers already have it.

Could be completely wrong, but it's my gut feeling.

 

It would certainly be interesting to know precisely how these Top Ten are calculated - but I doubt they take more than a month of time into account. Probably the window is one or two weeks. At least that's how I'd say my sales correlate with the position in those rankings. It's fairly easy to get into Top Paid or Top Grossing in some of the sub categories (e.g. Scripting / GUI) and if they'd really use the overall time, that would basically mean that almost no one is making any money on that store ... but "overall" isn't a timeframe usually used for such rankings, so I'd be very surprised.

Also keep in mind that there's a lot of new Unity users all the time (after all, there's a free version) ... and as long as Unity doesn't have a useable GUI system built in, they need something ... and why not take the top grossing / top paid asset on the asset store?

Another thing is that even of the existing Unity users, not all are using the asset store, so that's another influx of new users (people that are already using Unity but start using the asset store). And pretty much everyone needs a GUI in the games.

So, from a purely financial / profit oriented perspective, having "no good GUI" makes a lot of sense. The good thing is that at least from how I perceived the Unity folks so far, profit is not their primary motivation of doing what they do. So there's still hope ...

Speaking of hope: I really hope that they're building on top of what was presented at Unity 2012 because I actually liked that much better than NGUI (that's not being critical of NGUI, I think it's a really nice package - it's just because you can obviously do a different stuff if you directly integrate the system into the editor instead of putting it on top as an extension).

But I guess we'll have to remain patient to see what it will be ;-)

 

Honestly i more of hope they'd scrap this new guy, buy noesis and call that the official gui, then work on a V2 that is maybe more artist friendtly as another layer on top of it, i don't know what they're doing so can't really compare, but i really really doubt it can beat a WPF clone

 

Biased?

A world is a strange place. Java, Flex and Silverlight all lost the "browser wars" and Javascript won: no designer, no XAML. It was "just there", without a need to install any plugin. And worked across ALL the platforms. So you never know...

+1

I would also like to know how the new GUI going and if they started "from scratch" again.

Does anyone know the current state of the GUI? Is the IDE presented at Unity 2012 is still actual? If not, I'd like to see some screenshots of the "new new GUI". Perhaps a new blog post?

 

That is typically what happens what happens in a market like this. Only a certain amount of Unity users, a lesser amount that need a professional GUI, and then less that can or will pay for NGUI. By this point, those in that small group have probably purchased the asset already.

 

No not biased, but a professional WPF dev so of course i tend toward that, and i haven't ever seen a gui solution close in elegance to WPF, anything else looks like a mere toy in comparison, i wasn't expecting to see a real time game ready implementation like, ever, to be honest.

And you're mixing apple oranges, javascript doesn't compare, what do you mean no designer, javascript isn't a gui tech just a language, so it's html vs silverlight co (and silverlight was a big winner, but microsoft droped it, not sure why they switched their strategy of silverlight in favor of html5, a big error imho, office politics bleh).

 

Got the giggles, sorry. For real. Didn't even know about the "Windows Presentation Foundation", but this explains a bunch of your indeed biased comments. And one day you'll understand why silverlight and flash fell for HMTL5 Javascript. I call it free and open standard...

 

Wth are you smoking? Wpf doesn't (nor does it mean to) compare. It's a deployed rich client technology, it's not in the same league nor for the same uses as web APIs.
And i happen to love javascript and have developed large raw js web apps (js+wcf+html+knockout)
That you didn't know about a tech doesn't mean i'm biases. It means you should listen to people who know such tech and check if they're talking truth. You're missing out

 

A growing market which is continuously adding new users? Because that's what this market is.

--Eric

 

Well I'll tell you. It' s 2 things:

1. the lack of innovation (check out Adobe Flex/MXML and then compare it to Silverlight/XAML and you'll find out the world doesn't begin with MS)
2. the lack of belief in their own products and people and rather believing to a 3rd party trend forecasting (Steve Jobs)

Both (ADBE and MS) are getting rid of their RIA technologies, it's just that MS isn't honest with it so it doesn't tell this to devs (a friend of mine is a certified WPF that spent a mountain of money on the education: now feels betrayed cos MS is "silently" trying to "convert" guys like him to Javascript (with free courses etc.) while avoiding the to address the issue of abandoning WPF as a technology at all).

In these times you cannot believe companies selling you IDEs, it's understandable they will not tell you the truth (they still want you to buy their tech, but don't want to spend money on further development) so one has to figure it out by himself (I was a huge Flash/Flex fan you know.. ).

About the adoption rate: IMHO most Unity users don't want to install the 3rd party plugin to get the GUI up and running. Assets from the Asset Store already pose a problem, but the requirement of having another IDE for GUI makes it even worse.

There's already a great stuff out there - seen the Coherent UI? - totally great stuff, but I believe it's not for masses (at least from the NGUI pricing point). People just don't want to buy/use the additional stuff like Visual Studio/Expression Blend/Flash Professional etc. And that's what happened with Javascript: it's just there and everywhere.

Chances are that the "New new Unity GUI" will have the greatest adoption. Then there are the Asset Store plugins at the 2nd place, but meeting these requirements:

1. working across platforms (so "Windows only" or "Desktop only" isn't good enough)
2. working with a free version of Unity

At the 3rd place of adoption there will be a "professional" packages having the additional IDE as a prerequisite.

 

Hell no, while ms definately is phasing silverlight out, wpf certainly not, winRT is just a rebranded WPF really, knowledge translates 1:1 to it pretty much exactly. They're also not pushing javascript at all, just promoting it so that winRT (which is just really WPF) can be accessed also from JS C++, if you look at it from a realistic point of view they're more of saying "yea you C++ js guys are also going to use WPF" more than anything. Sure it's not named WPF, sure there are very tiny diferences, but overall it's WPF minus the blocking calls (a good thing) give or take a few details.

And no to me the reason for silverlight is more of internal (and wrong) decisions at MS, one core guy was pushing HTML5 as the future on everything, another silverlight, they also fought on other fronts, the silverlight guy lost, it's too bad IMHO because silverlight was years ahead of html5 but that's life, but on the client side, there's no war.

Now for the GUI solution, who wins what in the browser war is pretty irrelevant, as far as raw power / ease of use / flexibility etc is concerned, nothing comes close to WPF, nothing. HTML5 barely deserves the name of a toy, you can't mix a basic markup language that does basic layout with something like WPF, it's just not in the same league, it's like comparing productivity in punchcards vs C#. It's not at all about being a xml based format, that's a mere detail, it's about the feature set of the UI, the fact everything is overrideable, the fact functionality isn't mixed with design (and i don't mean not mixed as in in different files, but actually not mixed at all, sure in html you can separate html css, but html still is design, for exemple in html, a button is a square thing that can contain text and that can do something when you click on it, in wpf it's "just" something that does something when you click on it, if you'd rather have it be a vector pinguin with a video background mixed with a radial gradient overlay, so be it)

 

Haha!

Well as I said, the world is a strange place.. I personally found out that it's not aimed towards the productivity and maintainability at all (especially if your boss is not a programmer).

 

It does have a learning curve, i'll grant you that, so you won't see the benefits at first glance, but having personally ported (in a small 2 man team) a javascript application to WPF in my previous company, and that team was made of me and someone who didn't know WPF, we ported the app in 10 weeks (original time to make the app was in man years), which included the time for me to teach him WPF, and after that developement time went up 10X (yes, 10X, yes 1000%, no i'm not exagerating, but to be fair the previous app had to support down to IE6 and various browset support took about 50% of the time, the real speedup over IE8+ regular web based dev is closer to 500%, a bit less if you use modern webdev that relies a lot on javascript and not the, usually pretty inefficient, serverside gui components).
That + usuability went way up and we did a lot of things that we couldn't do before (the joy of having a dual core client side cpu per user vs 8 cores for the sum of all users i guess )

 

Just to be clear when i mention the speedup, the time before and after was with "the same team", the only change was going from asp.net + JS to WPF (including having to teach it)

 

I think they should name it "Unity DNF" that is... Unity's Duke Nukem Forever.

 

More like Unity 7.5 GUI at this rate.

 

It will be phased in in multiple steps, by unity 5 we will have text labels, and solid background colors, i think 5.1 may be bringing buttons.

 

LOL!!

 

And by the time we reach 5.4 we might have sliders.