So if you’re Indie like me, better make all your sprites pretty much a rectangle 
Ah well, you can’t have it all.
Might just stick with 2d tool kit…
That sucks. I was hoping to actually use this, but I guess it’s square sheets for me.
Why? Because of overdraw? Or colliders? Overdraw, sure, I get that if you are publishing to low(er) end mobile but colliders you can fix yourself.
Or is for optimal packing?
Or some other reason I missed?
Without Pro it just means you’re getting quad sprites, i.e. the same as you get with any 3rd party sprite toolkit.
Almost every single sprite kit out there supports atlasing and atlas generation.
Wait, what? Doesn’t Unity 4.3 Indie/Free include support for atlasing and atlas generation? I haven’t checked yet but I thought it only was that Pro had more/better tools for it but it was supported in Indie/Free as well.
2D Toolkit supports atlasing and mesh-based colliders. Free Unity’s 2D stuff doesn’t. You’re limited to Thomas Was Alone clones then 
From what I was reading, pro is required if you want really tight texture atlas packing where non-rectangular sprites can overlap into each others bounding rectangles - sort of like as if they were packed using physics colliders. Also you need pro to generate a sprite mesh that fits closely to the sprite shape rather than being a rectangle (to save fill-rate on mobile etc). But I did not see anything to suggest that mesh colliders are not in Free, or that you can’t edit them with Shift key?
You don’t need Pro for polygon colliders; the polygon shape that’s auto-generated isn’t the same as the mesh used for the sprite. So with Pro you’d just save on fill-rate (at the cost of more vertices, but usually vertices aren’t a problem).
–Eric
What I was referring to wasn’t the texture packing - that will pack the same in free and pro as far as I can tell.
Its the mesh used in the scene that the “sprite” texture is applied to, if my sprite image is a round coin then the pro version would create a nice round mesh shape - where the free version will used a rectangle. Meaning lots of drawing of alpha tested pixels in the corners.
Not too much of a problem if you’re on high end devices, or you’re not drawing too many of them.
You can always roll your own if you need to draw millions of round things 
It just hurts a little when I get excited about new features… then I see the dreaded words PRO ONLY! Eeek. But hey, the free version of Unity is utterly amazing - when we wrote our own in house tools to make Tomb Raider it took ages and - ok they did the job - but they were HELL to use 
If you need to draw millions of round things, you’d be better off using the circle collider
Well, that’s not relevant to what’s being drawn. Yes you will get unnecessary overdraw using quads instead of a tighter mesh, but the good news is that the days of iPhone 4-level hardware are long over, so it’s a “nice to have” thing but not really necessary.
–Eric
?
I thought only the Tight (mesh based) atlas packing was Pro, and rect atlas packing was in Free?
(Pro here so I can’t verify).
Whoops, yeah. I’ve completely misinterpreted this like five times now :v
The features you get for free, are worth it for free, so I think it’s fair.