NGUI vs UGH (Unity GUI Helper) and others

News & General Discussion
1

I’ve yet to purchase NGUI but I saw this new entrant UGH - Unity GUI Helper. And it looks like it does the same thing.

Has anyone used both? How do they stack up against each other? How is community support in either of them?

Also if I’m in a tight budget and could choose only one, would it be advisable to purchase, say, 2d Toolkit instead? As it seems tk2d can act as both sprite and GUI systems?

How does tk2d stack up against NGUI as a GUI system? Conversely, how does NGUI stack up against tk2d as a sprite animation system?

Also what I like about NGUI is the handful of “sub-plugins” supporting it, like HTML formatting support, ready-made floating damage numbers, MVVM pattern support, and two minimap implementations. I was wondering if UGH has some equivalent for those.

2

After a quick glance at ugh, it appears to have fewer features than NGUI. Namely the ability to create texture atlases which effectively limit the entire GUI to only one draw call. It also doesn’t seem to have the same plethora of example scenes as NGUI. Ngui is extremely seamless, I would be wary of risking use of another solution when it is only 5 dollars cheaper than NGUI.

3

Just a note: it seems the price of UGH changed to $55

4

The first feature dot point on their Asset Store listing:

I’m already using NGUI, but I’d definitely consider giving UGH a shot. (Though as a hobbyist I’m not in a rush to make the purchase just to check it out.)

5

@AnomalusUndog - there are 7:

Prime31 UI toolkit, NGUI, ScaleForm, Gree Flash Toolkit, HTML5 UI and two others which are not even on forum. They are not on forum and having a closed beta at this moment. They are very promising.

It depends how deep you are going and how complex.

For your PRG, I suggest the CoherentUI or ScaleForm/Unity3D if you can afford it.

For MMO level, you need nested list views, tree views, Cascading windows, direct server to client GUI transfer, Linq database connector to SQlLite (very useful IMHIO), Json/XML bindings, combo-boxes, list-boxes, MySQL data connection, HTML colored view, image gallery preview, tooltip-windows.