nGUI vs. Scaleform

Hello to everyone. I search for this question and i don't find any topic. I want to start a new project for mobile and I can't decide what GUI system should I chose between those two. I know the differences are big (the price to ) I work a little bit with both. Just want to ask you people, what tool you prefer, which is the most use?

 

In my opinion, nGUI is more popular for Unity users, and most of us has not experience with Scaleform. So, if you have worked with both - only you can make a right choice ;-)

 

Thanks for the reply.

 

Scaleform let's you design and code in flash and bring it into Unity. I'm not sure if they support all platforms since they are a native plugin.

 

Anecdotally, Scaleform has a relatively high runtime cost (in the AAA setting). Also, flash seems to be on its way out (losing support from Adobe itself, Unity, developers, and community). So, I'd do a lot of research before considering Scaleform.

If you're not time-sensitive, a GUI pipeline reboot is coming from Unity in this cycle (4.x), to follow the 2d stuff. Head up by the nGUI dev himself. Meanwhile, if you don't want to mess with OnGui(), and there seem to be many reasons not to, you might get by with use of GUIText and GUITexture in Update() if you can have a simple stand-in gui.

 

I never thought to use GUIText or GUITexture, but I don't think I can make GUI with just this because it is to complex. OnGUI is not an option because "eats" a lot of performance . Thanks a lot for your reply. It really helps me this feedback and maybe some others will to.

 

scaleform and ngui are actually two completely different things.

1. scaleform allows you to create entire games within your ui (theoretically) and is essentially flash with programmer hooks. This means visually there's no limits to what is happening in front of you. If a menu must fold out with the most bizarre animation possible, it can.

2. ngui is limited to what the developer feels is good for a gui. For instance it probably wouldn't do my games GUI very well since I have extremely game ish ui's that don't necessarily have os like widgets.

So they're very different things in my view despite tackling the same issue.

 

There is also Noesis GUI native plugin for Unity. I myself am still deciding. I will probably wait to see how the new Unity GUI will work

 

Daikon Forge seems also cool: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/194561-RELEASED-Daikon-Forge-GUI-Library.
However, there are so many GUI-Solutions out there and they're all different. It's hard to compare those because of this. You'll need to test them out and then decide by yourself.

 

@BDCJR I suggest PSD2NGUI If you gonna use NGUI with PSD2NGUI you can save huge of time.

 

For more complex (RIA, business type of apps) there's also eDriven (free evaluation version here).