Is anyone interested in Unity 4 dynamic font support in NGUI?
The idea is to never have to use BMFont again, and directly use Unity fonts instead. The upside is that you can easily have different fonts and font sizes in NGUI without the hassle of managing all those BMFont created textures.
If enough people are interested, I’m considering making this available as a simple extension package for NGUI, for 39$.
How robust are we talking? Support for gradients, outlines, drop shadows? If it’s just rendering dynamic fonts as part of an NGUI panel I’d say it’s over priced; but if it’s half as robust as Glyph Designer it would be a day 1 purchase for me, absolutely.
It’s just an extension that removes the hassle of creating font textures with BMFont, nothing more.
Benefits:
save time
be able to change font size/style directly in Unity without managing all those BMFont txt files and textures
keep your built file smaller (since none of these font textures are packed in)
Otherwise it supports all the NGUI features in the same way (anything that comes with UILabel).
Truth is, I’d be more than happy if this feature came for free with an NGUI upgrade, so this extension primarily targetted at existing NGUI users who want to improve their workflow until that happens (if it does happen, since NGUI’s developer is very busy with other important projects, such as building the next gen Unity integrated GUI system). The reason I am putting a price tag on this package if I decide to release it is mainly to cover my dev and support time on this.
I haven’t tested it on all platforms, but since Unity4 dynamic fonts are cross platform, it should work on pc,mac,web,ios,android.
I’m not sure about the status of the Linux player. iF NGUI works fine on it, since these is no indication in the Unity documentation that dynamic font don’t, then it should most likely work on that platform too.
Remember that this is an extension to NGUI, so you need to have a NGUI licence with source code to use it. The extension would basically replaces some of the NGUI source files with modified versions.
Thinking about it, i will probably just release the code for free, as a contribution to the community. I’m just checking if that’s compliant with NGUI’s licence.
ah sorry, that thread on the other forum is getting crowded. The attachments are on the second page of the thread, look for ‘Unisip’ as poster
BTW, the main bug in this implementation is related to vertical placement of characters. It has something to do with the info that we get from the font through the CharacterInfo class. I haven’t bothered too much about it so far, but it is clear that there is a problem with vertical placement, that gets larger as you increase the font size. Don’t have time to look into this right now, but i’ll try to get back at it when possible. If someone figures it out in the meantime, please post the solution.
Awesome! I tested it and it works with NGUI ver 2.2.7c. I think he mistyped it as 2.7.7c. It supports Asian languages such as Chinese also
Anyway, NGUI has released the newer version which is currently ver 2.3.4. Would you be willing to update the package to match the newest version of NGUI? As there are lots of errors when I try to fix it myself. Thank you very much