Please list the assets you think people must purchase when developing with Unity and also those you think might be useful or are planning to buy when you can. Please include links to the asset store if you can and explain why you think it is a must have.
My must haves:
ProGrids: Unity’s snapping is somewhat lacking for me, this makes up for that and makes using model asset kits easy to line up.
ProBuilder: Great for white-boxing or even modeling a level right inside of Unity. The developers have been great, providing bugfixes and updates and responding to questions. Really good guys providing a great value.
UFPS - Ultimate First Person Shooter system. This is the best FPS system in the asset store and is reallly cheap. This is even just fun to drop an “Advanced Player” into your scene of new models you just purchased (after adding weapons and bullets in the latest version) so you can run around and shoot things up. They are currently working on adding network support.
Of course, all the free Unity stuff. There is a lot of free textures, models, textures, scripts, etc. in the free Unity projects like Boot Camp and Angry Bots. Even some great editor scripts like exporting selected objects or replacing prefabs.
I similarly enjoy ProBuilder. ProGrids is a requirement if you want to get the most out of ProBuilder, but aside from that I’m not sure I’d have much interest in it… I’d also appreciate it more if it was more flexible than it is - grids aren’t the only thing you might want to snap to.
I really like UniBill for in-app purchase support. Haven’t used it for a while, but I remember it being a snap to implement.
I’ve only made a couple of very simple uses of it so far, but FinalIK seems pretty amazing.
The Universal Sound FX pack seems pretty amazing. I picked it up the moment I first saw it, and it’s grown since. Fingers crossed I’ll never have to waste time trawling the Internet looking for first-pass sound effects again.
AI for Mecanim seemed pretty neat the one time I used it, however it also seemed to be undergoing a huge rewrite at the time.
Shaderforge as i always had problems with scripting this asset was very important to me in my project.
UFPS very cheap very advance first person controller excelent for the begginers and good start for the advance.
Crafty for Unity THE best patching system i found and tested on the asset store and outside market, must have if you want to have a patch able project.
and of course NGUI at this point i think everybody knows NGUI.
Just bought this as soon as I saw your comment and checked it out.
Terrain Composer and RTP for me, although I’m still learning both they are fun to play with. On the Terrain Composer side I really don’t use much of the generation features, just mainly importing my own RAW heightmaps because I can import a very large heightmap which TC will split and stitch into multiple terrains for me.
I echo others here on Shader Forge. For me it is a must have if you do anything with shaders.
In terms of mesh deformation and animation, I like Mega-Fiers. I actually like most Chris West’s products.
Now a fairly new one that I feel is a must have, is Text Mesh Pro. Although it is advertised as a replacement for Text Mesh, it offers so much more in terms of features and the rendering quality of the text is simply amazing. If you use text in your games or projects, you ought to take a look at Text Mesh Pro.
Editor Console Pro: so you can see (and make your code editor jump to) the call stack of your logs
Full Inspector: your Inspector on steroids
xARM: get screenshots of your game in different resolutions quickly, useful for mobile apps
Master Audio: handles music crossfading and sound effect variation for me
My “bread and butter” assets that are helpful in pretty much any game:
NGUI
Pool Manager (object pooling)
Master Audio (music and sound fx with many features)
cInput (add sanity to getting input, an interesting alternative is InControl)
For mobile games, I’d add xARM (see how your game will look on a bunch of different aspect ratios and resolutions).
