2D Tookit is still useful?

As Unity5 is free and already has a batching system, I was wondering if 2D Toolkit is still useful and, if yor answer is positive, why?

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It merges sprites into bigger meshes, saving lots of triangles.

SpriteTile on the other hand does not do that, it rather just displays only those sprites that are currently visible by the camera.

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Yep… I use normal maps with my sprites so they respond to light. 2D Toolkit keeps the normal map atlas and the sprite atlas in sync… which is a big deal.

Sprite 9-slicing… also handled well by 2D toolkit. At least in Unity 4.6 (don’t know about 5.x) 9-slicing can be done by UI elements but not by Sprite. You can edit the border of a texture but the Unity Sprite doesn’t support 9-slicing as far as I can see (UI Image does). That’s another big deal.

You can of course work around these things, but you could of course also make your own sprite framework. The point of having this stuff is so you don’t have to fiddle with what should be platform stuff… and 2D Toolkit still seems to be a better option, IMO.

You can do the normal mapping stuff with SpriteTile, too, but you need to have your atlases prepared beforehand.

Any other feature that 2D Toolkit does better than Unity (or Unity doesn’t)?

I personally can’t stand Unity’s 2d stuff… When I was in school for games , I seen many use that and they always asked why I had less draw calls…

I like the Sprite Atlas. I feel the overall UI is alot more cleaner and easier to use.

I always seen people have a wierd line flicker in the backgrounds when they would batch sprites… when I did it with 2D tool kit, never had that issue ever… But nearly every person that used Unity would have that as they moved. 2D tool kit also alot faster to set up animations and sprites because of the Atlas. I also can use it with a 3rd party program called Spine…

NGUI works great since I can use batching, and the atlas , that part not sure if Unity can or not. never tried. But I like how many tools work well with 2D tool kit… I will never ever use Unity 2d tools. I have used and hated and I been using 2D tool kit for years… I wanted to try Unitys just to see… but not impressed… better than nothing, but 2D tool kit well worth the cash…

I’m sure there are many other reasons, but can’t think at this second, not making a 2D game right now so I have not had to use in awhile, other than the batching for my UI.

Sprite Packer to the rescue.