I have developed something like a kitchen planner. It was meant to run in the browser as plugin or standalone. Now my task is to port it to the iPad. I used the UnityGUI for my GUI, which worked well for the web-version. But on iPad the app was running terribly slow and often didn’t react on touch inputs. So I have written own GUI Classes for buttons and menus and planned to build and cache the GUI on one big texture at runtime to use 1 draw call, until there is a change and rebuild it. To piece the GUI together I followed the methode in this threat.
This works for a few buttons, but if I add a few more, they disappear all. In addition I mention a huge amount of memory allocated (250MB). So finally, this seems not to be an alternative.
I have attached a screenshot of the web-version of my project. As you can see, there are about 60 GUI elements on the screen at the same time. Some of them have 2 or 3 states, some menus are shiftable, so sometimes they are visible, sometimes not.
Is it at least imaginable, that there is a methode to get this app running smooth on the iPad? And has anyone an idea how it could be realized? I am out of ideas at the moment.
Try EZGUI. It brings it down to one or two drawcalls. As for UI. Separate the tools into trees for various tasks and have an icon for all branches of that node and when you choose that node you get the branches for that node. Display perhaps as a center node with a wheel of sub nodes around. Choose the spoke node and it becomes the hub or a HUD. Things like a color or object palette can be added to any hub as a spoke as necessary. A mode driven switchable toolbar, as per you screenshot would alleviate the space issues perhaps.
Thank you for your hints.
I am already at 1 draw call for the entire GUI. EZGUI costs money as well as the Sprite Manager 2. As far as I can see, Sprite Manager 1 has no support for text and I need text for descriptions and so on.
I can imagine what you described with the wheel-like tree menu, but I think in a kitchen planner most of the time you will search for furniture, color them and then place them in the scene. That’s why there is a object library at the bottom and an attribute manager at the right side. For avoiding permant changes between menus I have them visible all at once.
version 1 does not serve any purpose, what it does is now done by dynamic batching on its own.
If you don’t want to invest money you will have to invest several weeks of your time and you must be living in a really poor country to make this work out cheaper than buying said licenses …
