Why do you need NGUI?

I keep hearing everyone uses NGUI plugin. But I'm still not sure what exactly it does?

From examining few videos online.

The most useful features of NGUI for me would be
1) UIRoot - FixedSize (resizing) mobile game elements positioning
2) Draw Call reduction

But Unity 5 does that already in engine.

What other features are most useful in NGUI in your opinion?

 

It might help to know a little bit of history of uGUI. Before the Unity GUI was revamped, Unity's GUI only used the "immediate mode" rendering system, which is not always the most performant in the case of production in-game rendering. NGUI grew a large user base from its ease of use, stability and high performance/optimization. Unity hired the author of NGUI as a consultant for a few months to assist in the development of uGUI that you see today. And uGUI is largely similar in usage as NGUI at this point. However, the user-base for NGUI is still relatively large, and I'm sure quite a few, if not several, high-quality games have shipped with it. I occasionally read about stability issues with uGUI on the forums in the past several months, but I can't attest to any of these issues, since I'm happy using NGUI. I'm giving myself about a full year before switching over to uGUI, especially since I've already paid for NGUI, and I seem to be getting my money's worth.

 

You don't. NGUI is only used by those who got heavily involved in UI development before the new UI. It takes a lot of effort to change systems. So many studios have not bothered.

But if you are just starting in Unity I wouldn't worry about NGUI

 

NGUI was the best UI solution before Unity5 was released...

 

Ok. Thank you.

 

before UGUI was born，the unity build-in ui is too simple and ugly.
the feature such as grid layout, show part ui in a panel ,sliders, drag and drop, and so on that I often use in worktime.