Hi everyone, I’m created a 2D game, and fully realize that I definitely need SM2.
My question is… what about EZGUI?
Does anyone use this? I looked up the information, but still am a bit confused on what I could do with this compared to not having it.
What benefits would EZGUI have over…not having EZGUI?
My game is purely 2D images, no 3D at all, although i will have particle effects.
I am asking mainly because of the huge price of both. EZGUI is cheaper when bundled with SM2, which I am 100% going to get. Unless you’d argue I don’t need that either.
Hopefully someone with experience in both can guide me to the positives of EZGUI or perhaps persuade me not to get it if it wouldn’t help me very much. I don’t really know what it could do for a 2D game besides make some cool GUI things like health bars or progress bars.
EZGui makes it way easier to create nice GUIs and it also incorporates a one draw call solution for them. I’m guessing the latter can be achieved with SM2 alone. I would only go for SM2, but that’s because I’m broke. Otherwise EZGui would save me quite a bit of time.
That’s how you should calculate whether you need any other middleware solution. Does it save you time? If yes, how many man-hours does it save? How much do you value your time ? For example, it would save me at least a week or two. That’s 120 man-hours; 120*3 bucks an hour (yes I’m that cheap) would equal 360 USD. Thus, if I’d have the cash, I’d buy it.
I really want to make some nice GUI’s, and make the game look really nice in that regard.
So EZGUI is for me?
To be honest, I wish there was more explanation of the capabilities of EZGUI than the webpage shows.
For example, I want to make a hotbar with abilities, which refresh with a cool effect (perhaps a fire border or water inside the key) while the ability recharges. Would EZGUI save me a lot of time to do this, or is this simple in the first place?
I really don’t want to buy a program that simplifies what is already simple and easy. I am not a professional programmer, so I’m not sure how long it’ll take to actually do myself what EZGUI would do for me.
I’m broke too, but I could spare the money. It’s just a lot of money compared to other stuff I could use the money on for the game.
It would cost me $150 for EZGUI for a total of that + SM2. That’s $300 compared to half of that for SM2 only.
But then again… with a 60 day return prolicy…I guess I could try both out and if I don’t like EZGUI, only keep SM2.
That is pretty tempting…giving plenty of time to test it out.
Make no mistake. EZ GUI is a must for your HUD toolkit and makes cool in game interactive objects as well. It is not just a GUI plugin, though that is its strongest point.
I’m going to piggyback on this thread since it’s similar to my question… for creating a PC game based in 3D rather than 2d sprites (and possibly porting to Android later), would I need SM2 and EZGUI or just EZGUI? As I understand it, EZGUI is made a lot easier to use for GUI’s if you have SM2… is that correct or is SM2 really unneeded for my usage scenario? I didn’t expect the pricing to go up so much when they announced a raise was coming, so now I’m unsure whether to buy the whole kit or not (as well as wishing I’d jumped on it at $99 for both!).
Well, as an early adopter, I can’t think of a better purchase, outside of Unity.
As to whether you need both, that would really depend on how you were planing to use them. If you want to have sprite based characters that animate, or buttons in your GUI that animate, than you would need both. They both work independently of each other amazingly well, but together they are a powerful one two punch.
I wouldn’t mind knowing a bit more detail about this as well… I don’t necessarily need all that SM2/EZGUI have to offer, but if it’s worth the time it saves reinventing the wheel in terms of quality and ease I’d rather just buy it. It looks like EZGUI would be 100% worth it for me, offhand, but not SM2. I assume I can simply provide my own sprite atlases to EZGUI and it will animate them?
EZGUI is implemented in such a way that SM2 works painlessly with it. Big difference - GUIs are the buttons, list boxes, toggles, windows… nothing to do with Sprites.
If by “animate” you mean translate them between two areas on the screen then yes, EZ GUI can do that. However, if you mean animate in terms of frame-switching along a timeline then no, you’d need SM 2 for that as far as I know (or you’d need to write your own UV animation tools). The big time saver with SM2 here is that you don’t need to mantain a list of atlas coordinates - SM2 takes care of everything.
If you want animated sprites and your buying EZ Gui anyway, SM2 is absolutely worth the price.
