NGUIDepth - Intuitive and easiest depth management for NGUI

[thienhaflash]

I’m super happy to announce that our lastest extension NGUIDepth is now available on AssetStore for 10$

Well, not much thing to tell, this is just a drag and drop to depth manager for NGUI widgets, very easy and intuitive. I always find it’s difficult to adjusting the depth for each widget, and it all make me crazy when NGUI keep complaining about depth collision, I even tried some other NGUI depth management tool that changes the renderqueue and resulted in nightmare. Ok, I’m not blaming, that surely because I used it the wrong way. But in the end, that’s not normal user’s fault, there must be a more intuitive way to do it.

So, here it is, NGUIDepth v1.0.0. I really hope that you will find it easy and intuitive to use as I found when creating this. Here are some shots :

Thanks a lot for reading and If you find any other problem or have any suggestion, please do let me know.
And if anyone want to have it support for DKForge or any other 3rd plugins please let me know also, I will be more than happy doing that.

Thanks again.

[thienhaflash]

I must admit that after using this Depth management tool for some time, I’m disappointed with the limitations, some being reported by users, included :

• The list is huge, when there are a lot of widgets inside each panel, and managing such huge list in a specific order would be a pain in the ass
• When there are a lot of widgets has the same name, we can never know which one is which
• Not all widgets show up at the same time, still we need to determine which one is over which one and it’s taking a lot of time, stupid wasted work …

So I was thinking over and over again how can I could improve it to make NGUIDepth more intuitive. I see the potential of drag and drop depth managing, it’s much better than tossing a number on each widget … So, I come up with a solution :

Only manage Widgets that are visible at the same time (most of the time, are inside a common parent GameObject) In this demo, d2Component being attached to the Left GameObject so only children widgets of the Left GameObject being managed (being Iisted). We will call this an independent-depth-manager (sorry, I can’t think of any better name), IDM for short

Instead of sorting widgets one by one we can create Groups and put widgets in then sort the order of Groups. The group structure is mostly rigid, e.g. : backgrounds, sprite, texture, icon, text, badge … sorting widgets are as easy as moving a widget to the correct Group.

We can also quickly move an IDM over another by changing the stack property. This way, it’s truely easy to move an IDM up and down compared to others. See how Left IDM and Center IDM overlaps, then moving on top of each other

So, that’s briefly what’s coming next for NGUIDepth. I really hope this version will make you happy.

Thanks a lot. Any suggestion, feedbacks, critics are welcome, as usual

p/s : One more screenshot

The pictures are pretty huge (1.9 MB each :(, maybe I should made video cast instead, sorry everyone)