Have you been tempted to give NGUI a try, but just don’t want to commit to spending money on something that you may not use? Well, you’re in luck. You can now download the full version of NGUI for free.
Click the logo to download the Unity Package.
What’s in the package? The last version of NGUI 2 cycle – NGUI 2.7.0.
What’s the catch? NGUI 2 has been deprecated in September 2013 when NGUI 3 came out, so it’s an older version that won’t have all the latest features and optimizations of the current one. It also doesn’t come with support. The last restriction is that if used for commercial purposes, it falls under the same restrictions as Unity Free: “free version may not be licensed by a commercial entity with annual gross revenues (based on fiscal year) in excess of US$100,000, or by an educational, non-profit or government entity with an annual budget of over US$100,000”
Great Aren. I always thought that every package should come with a trial, so this is awesome. Still didn’t get it, but will probably grab it for my next project.
By the way, I never put anything on the Asset Store, but from what I understand it is quite complicated to develop “Trial” versions: how did you achieve it? I’d love for other developers to follow your steps
Wow this is definitely a great idea, and from the looks of it a great package. I’ll definitely be checking it out. Though I would like to ask for some clarification regarding:
If you package NGUI on a commercial asset I presume:
The developer must own a commercial license for NGUI (only makes sense)
Stipulate that their package is only for non-commercial uses unless the purchasing user also purchases NGUI?
#2 is what I’m confused about. If you use NGUI in a commercial asset, are customers of such an asset also obliged to purchase the commercial NGUI package prior to using their purchased asset commercially?
Allowing NGUI inclusion with your asset store projects is a clever marketing idea. The buyer needs to buy the license for NGUI to use it for commercial stuff.
Oh you clever man.
@DavidB: The Free Edition can be distributed, the Standard / Pro editions can’t. This is mainly targeted at other content developers producing something for the Asset Store. For example – this lets anyone create custom fancy skins for the UI, complete with a full UI layout and setup, or create a much more interesting looking UI for their Starter Game Kit than they would with Unity’s GUI.
The buyers of this “combo package” may already own a standard copy of NGUI, so upgrading for them would be a simple matter of replacing the NGUI folder within. Or maybe they won’t want the UI part of it at all, and bought it for some other purpose (game mechanics for example) – in which case they can just stay with the free version, provided the UI won’t be used in their own final product.
All I did was put a part of NGUI into a managed C# DLL, and created a new package with a price of $0. It was fairly easy with how NGUI was designed – most things were already compartmentalized nicely.
Bottom line is – the less spaghetti code you have, the easier it is.
P.S. This entire “free edition” endevour has a very high chance of blowing up in my face by hurting my own sales, so I am taking a pretty big risk here… Either the sales will stay solid and I will continue development of NGUI, or they will slow down, which will cause me to go work on something else. So if you like what you see, consider investing in future features, and let me know! I’ll happily share the results of this semi-experiment with the rest of the community.
