Which UI solution are you using for your projects right now?

So which one is it?

 

uGUI

 

The built in. Why use anything else?

 

I actually put Viking Chess! on hold for several months while I was waiting for 4.6 to come out so that I could use uGUI rather than something else. I imagine if the project was further along before that and I had already implemented nGUI or a different product, I would have just stuck it out and used that.

Likewise, if I had been making games for years with nGUI and knew it like the back of my hand, I'd have considered sticking with that after uGUI's introduction.

But yeah, uGUI for me, now and always.

 

UGUI. Easy to lay out and to work with it. Also have 3D GUIs (as in, scene-space). Haven't had need for another gui solution, especially since it's getting better and better (more widgets, though following are still missing: ListBox, up/down integer inputfield, date/time input, possibly with calendar, file browser, color input - I mean those can be redone, but it'd be nice to have them in proper UI).

 

UGUI. It's so easy to use that it's actually worth the ten thousand year wait it took to implement it.

 

I'm using NGUI. I'm curious to know how many people transitioned to using uGUI from NGUI. I'm using NGUI because it's pretty mature, I'm familiar with it, and I already bought it more than 6 months prior to uGUI's release.

 

Is there any reason not to use UGUI at this point? The best I can imagine is that you need more features out of the box, because you lack access to a programmer.

 

uGUI
It works, what more could you want

 

More UI components?

Some people put "Something else..." as a response. What other UI solutions are out there?

UGUI is nice, but can affect performance especially on mobile.

 

Primitives with colliders. At least that's what I'm betting they're referring to. I'm using uGUI.

 

unity ui, of course. Anything else gets done custom by us.

 

Unity UI. (BTW, UGUI isn't the correct name. See Unity's clarification here: "The new UI is not called uGUI. If you want something resembling a name, call it Unity UI.")

Within the last 6 months I've still received one or two questions about using 2D Toolkit UI with the Dialogue System.

 

Unity UI and styled to how I want it to fit the game.

 

But why wouldn't there be something resembling a name? Something that might be easy to search for, maybe? You know, so that when people google questions about it they don't get swamped with a hundred legacy UI threads instead of what they're actually looking for.

 

nGUI on SWC, UI for projects in development. SWC is live and solid, there is no reason to replace something that works. Also there are a few things that nGUI does a bit better out of the box (world space text, performance/batching). But going forward, UI is the preferred solution.

 

There was a thread about it back in the 4.6 beta. Unity Technologies didn't bother coming up with a specific name. No one really uses the name for the particle system. Or the animation system. So they just went with UI.

 

If you have already built it in nGUI, there currently isn't a major compelling reason to switch. The only concern that we are keeping in the back of our minds is that there could a point when it isn't supported anymore or fails to work with a future version of Unity.

 

Well, mechanim yes, shuriken no. Probably because there is a specific part of the animation system that's really considered "mechanim". Hell, I just figured out the old gui is being called IMGUI yesterday (and I don't remember why; I've been working on modeling for the last two weeks, so it's not like I was editor scripting or anything).

 

Immediate Mode GUI

 

I know why it's called that. I just don't know why I found that out.

 

I seriously thought there wold be more than my solo vote for NGUI. I'm in the early stages of a project now, using NGUI, and the results of this thread are making me think otherwise (Imagine that... a poll that actually convinces someone to change..) Well, I've worked with NGUI for 3 Android projects, currently porting 2 of them to iOS, so I will still have to maintain them. But it sounds like I'll have to start transitioning to Unity UI now. It definitely makes sense though. It's been out in the wild long enough, and support will likely be more reliable, seeing it'd be on the same forums as the rest of Unity. Also, considering Mike's game Windward has already shipped, there is a greater likelihood that his support for NGUI will start to wane.

 

Unity UI (a.k.a. uGUI) still does not have vector graphics capabilities as far as I know. So your images etc don't look crisp at all resolutions, and you have to slap a resolution scaling script on your canvases -- or still make the proper image for a given resolution. That would be one big reason why not to use the Unity UI.

That being said, having vector graphics doesn't out-weigh the ease of use using the built-in Unity solution, so I end up settling for Unity's UI.

Also can I complain for a second, why on earth can't we get clean crisp text out-of-the-box after it's been like 20-30 years that people have been making games now? You'd think we would have that on lock down by now. And I'm not talking only about Unity, but game making tools in general (all game engines etc..). It's like Scaleform or bust right now. I've also strongly considered using Coherent UI. Again....for vector graphics reasons.

 

This proves that a well thought out in engine system can't be beat..

 

I use Text Mesh Pro with Unity UI. It makes crisp, beautiful text in world space or screen/camera space, and it's fully integrated with Unity UI (at least as far as I've needed to use it) so I still get the ease of use of Unity UI.

 

A related, but possibly too detailed question.. On Horde Rush, I made a social media screenshot, similar to Crossy Road. The screenshot was a RenderTexture of the game, and on top of it was an NGUI overlay of the game logo and score. The way I approached this is to render to the RenderTexture twice; once for the main camera, and on top of it with the NGUI camera.

I noticed that Unity UI does not use a Camera per se (or does it?). If this is the case, how would I approach the same thing in Unity UI?

 

Maybe I'm missing the point, but wouldn't you just render your gameplay using a regular camera and then render your game logo and score using a Screen Space - Overlay Canvas?

 

Well, alright then... I haven't used Unity UI yet, so I'll look into that if/when I get there.

 

the one built into unity

 

UGUI (Unity UI) is driven mainly through gameobject based system - you drag buttons into scenes. IMGUI is called through code located inside of OnGUI() function.

The good thing about IMGUI is that your hierarchy is not cluttered with UI components. On the other hand, you're left with hundreds of lines of code, meaning that you'll waste additional time looking for a specific GUI component.

 

Plus a massive performance hangover. The main drawback of the legacy GUI system was that the entire thing had to be redone every frame. With the UI system nothing is called if the UI is just sitting there.

 

Although, UGUI is not performing well either. For some reason, if I enable a UI panel over other GUI components, 60FPS turns to 40-45 FPS (on Android devices with 1.5GHz CPU).

 

Pretty much exactly the same thing with me. NGUI because the Unity GUI was nowhere near ready when I started on my current game. If I ever make another game I'd probably use uGUI.

 

It takes a lot of fiddling to get the performance solid, but it can be done. Try reducing nesting, image overlap also using not using tight fit on sprites helps. It can be a bit tedious, and often times non-intuitive, but it can be done.

 

I'm experimenting with Unity UI, and I wanted to add some text effects that NGUI includes by default: upper/lower color gradient, and dropshadow/outline, with adjustable thickness. It doesn't look like Unity UI has this (yet?). Are those using Unity UI actually satisfied with this?

 

Unity UI for newer projects, and a couple of different custom solutions for older projects.