New Unity3D 4.0 GUI

Yea but it implies a regression, in exchange for sliders, button will be downgraded to square only instead of rectangles, for performance reasons!

 

I would rather Unity's HL2 Episode 3, as it will most likely be worth the wait. Duke Nukem Forever was awful.

 

The guy who still selling NGUI (he say he makes 300 000$ a year I think) is working on a solution at Unity that will make his own product obsolete and losing most of his revenu.... (I doubt Unity pay him enough to make 300 000$ a small amount)
His best interest is to work fast, or to slow things down ?
No one see a conflict of interest ?

Honestly I've worked on many GUI system in many games. Even with a reboot of the tech and even if they want to polish things, it shouldn't take that long...
There is probably a "political" reason (people in the management that can't work with each other, financial interest etc..).

At least Unity will loose money with the new GUI system! They take a cut in every GUI asset they sold with the asset store. GUI asset are one of the asset that earn the most. If a GUI system is integrated in Unity, they will simply loose this revenue stream...

They shouldn't hire this guy without NGUI if they really want things to go fast. They should have bought NGUI tech with the guy. They didn't. It's a bad move or a smart move.

They have hired the one guy that will probably slow things down and still show to the community that they get the best people to work on this feature...

My conclusion: So we are going to probably wait for another year or two

 

1) I really really doubt he's raking in 300K/year, that's a huge amount of sales there at his price point.
2) I also really doubt there's nothing in his contract around that, anyone hiring someone with competing interests has such clauses (for example, it's possible they bought back the rights, or give him substantial bonus on delivery milestones etc). If he was slowing things down for his own product, he'd be long fired for sure.

But yea seeing how long it takes, it better be damn good when it ships, what surprise me isn't how long it takes, but how long it still takes since something was in demo-able shape

 

1) That's a number he stated @GDC2013... I even think it was $400k

 

Even rounding up to 100$ (higher than real price and assuming most are non sale sales) that's 4K sales / year, sounds like a lot but i guess it's possible. Didn't think he'd make that much.
Edit: before counting the store cut too.

 

This is what ArenMook said in this thread:

I see no reason for him to lie really and the numbers definitely seem possible, e.g. at $95, that would equal (taking into account Unity's Share) only around 4,500 sales.

Even if we factor in cheap sales and the cheaper price point when the asset was first released and take a wild guess at 20,000 sales, that is still quite believable given the number of registered Unity users being around 1 million, that's only 2% percent of registered users.

As nearly everyone serious about making a game (and definitely anyone making a mobile game) needs to either buy a GUI toolkit or roll their own, the top grossing asset in the asset store (NGUI) is bound to make a killing.

EDIT: Haha! Beaten. That will teach me for trying to write a long post...

 

It's not 2%, it's 2% "per year", which is probably closer to 20% of people willing to spend money, but yea no reason for him to lie, i wasn't implying that, i'd be curious to know what he earns from it now that the initial market has ngui however, but that's quite a success.

Hell i'm tempted to make my own gui framework now lol.

 

I am a huge fan of those Unity GUI conspiracy theories, at least it is funny to read them.

As far as I know the new GUI will rely on several new features that are not yet in the official releases (nested prefabs, timeline and an event system). It doesn't matter if it relies on all of them or not. As such, the new GUI can't be finished, before the stuff it is based on is production ready. It obviously isn't production ready, because then it would usually be in Unity.

Let the conspiracy begin:
The new GUI is based on new features that are most likely implemented by others. According to your logic, they hold their implementations back, such that more money can be made with NGUI. Maybe those guys are paid by ArenMook . Maybe the Unity management directly ordered that the implementations are not released to make more money with NGUI . Which other features that would make our life so much easier are not published by that Unity mafia? I strongly believe that they know how to heal cancer, feed every person on this planet and give them enough clean water! They know what it takes to have piece on earth, but they don't publish it, because they want to make money with NGUI!

Sorry, couldn't resist.

 

Don't be rude! Let's call it a "win-win" situation.

Millions $$$ of revenue lost - but for NOT HAVING the GUI!

(your calculations are wrong, they made me lough though.. )

Remember: Unity is the most used game engine around, and is constantly expanding. It has the potential to be used in many other areas too (not gaming-related): medicine, architecture, military, smart TVs... you name it. It could be huge, and ubiquitous. My own research shows it is a complete RIA solution, and could be a decent rival to strongest RIA players.

Now, how many of the potential clients they could have lost over the past years because of the fact that it has no GUI system (at least the one UT is proud of)?

User interface is a very important thing for a human-to-computer communication, you know. Nobody wants to blush in front of their potential client for not having a GUI system!

 

Epic !

 

why delayed the launch of the NewGUI? I do not understand. It's not like a huge new technologies I heard the NewGUI is NGUI-MINOR-VERSION more surprising fact is that NGUI developer have been making Unity's New GUI Over 1 year Nevertheless, the New GUI is still not been released How is this possible?

 

I think it must be the extra features they want the new GUI to have (not available with NGUI).

Anyway, the new sprite system as really awesome (check it out) - having my fingers crossed to be as great as the old (low-level) IMGUI is.

 

Meanwhile the new 2d features function as a nice surrogate GUI system. It will be intersting to see how Duke Nukem Forever GUI will supplement 2D stuff. Would be a bit weird if the two had completely different workflows/systems.

 

Whoa, hey, whoa.

Duke Nukem Forever was released.

 

I think the road is not so cloudy anymore since it was announced that NGUI is the base for the new GUI. It was also stated that ArenMook from NGUI is working full time for Unity. Now check out the change logs of NGUI since then. In my opinion development got much more traction and the features added make total sense in the scope of "What might people have most trouble with if this would be the new standard".

The latest addition, anchoring, is just another huge step besides bug fixing, solving the depth issues, unifying and streamlining controls and creating more documentation. All that hints to me there might actually be a release in ~ 2-4 months as NGUI feels much better already.

Some quirks still have to be solved and simplification driven even further. My personal wishlist: The widget manipulators are still clumsy to use in the viewport, still too many components need to be employed to get something done, many scripts expose too many advanced parameters which should be not-expanded by default, normal and GUI events by colliders should be merged in a more obvious way, maybe some more specialized controls should be added (e.g. dedicated UI camera), modal dialogs should be supported out of the box, "press-a-key-to-continue" support out of the box, then there is the notion of panels, widgets and controls (like buttons). Are controls inside widgets inside panels? Or are some controls widgets? Never understood that and I think that is in my opinion just one level too much. I'd recommend to go for containers (with optional layouting features) and controls, like other UI frameworks do, whereby containers can be inside containers again.

 

For this you must have the right core to build upon. With GUI frameworks, everything builds on top of other stuff, so if it wasn't planned during the initial proof-of-concept phase it's very hard to implement it later.

 

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