And think ‘Awesome’ so I read the description box and discover this:
WTF???
So to get this working you need to pay $90 for this asset then $75 for 2D Toolkit and $95 for NGUI
Total extra spend to use this asset $170
I have read other threads where people have had their assets refused because they depend on the purchase or use of other assets to function yet others are allowed.
I am used to ‘requires NGUI’ for assets but to require 2 extra eassets at a total of $170 is ridiculus.
Also this $170 would be a lot more for me because it would be charged in Euros with VAT added too.
Sometimes there is no way around dependencies. It is clearly stated that it is based on those assets, so I don’t see a problem. It is your decision whether you want to spend that money or not.
Many people use NGUI, making an asset at this level i.e. something like a game toolkit. It makes sense to base much of your GUI work on NGUI instead of having to always use the Unity GUI which is lacking.
I dont use NGUI and I am sure there are more people who dont use it than there are who do. It does not make sense to base much of your work on NGUI as there are alternatives available in the asset store.
The point I am trying to make is this asset requires 2 other assets to function and I am sure a lot of sale will be lost due to this, me being one of them.
Ngui is an assetstore best seller, a load of people have bought it,
2dtoolkit is an assetstore best seller, a load of people have bought it.
It looks to me like a big interesting niche of buyers, and they know that a product well made is worth spending.
Why not? As long as the dependencies are clearly stated. A good example is the MVVM Toolkit for NGUI. If those are popular frameworks it only makes sense that someone should build upon them. To add to this… just the fact that people are able to build upon them is a good sign that the underlying asset is extensible.
One thing that would be cool though is some kind of linking… so the user who creates the asset instead of just saying it’s required has to select them and the asset store would show the required assets. If the user doesn’t already have those assets they can choose to add them to the cart as well.
There is a second city builder starter kit which only needs NGUI and it’s 47.50 Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making obviously it’s not ideal from your POV but still considerably cheaper than the other option.
Then this package obviously isn’t created for you. Your request is basically like saying it should be forbidden to require Unity Pro for packages on the Asset Store. Of course, a lot of people create assets that don’t have that requirement - but some do. Obviously their target audience is only Unity Pro owners. So would you rather not have them publish their assets just because you don’t own Unity Pro? That would be quite an egoistic attitude (only seeing yourself and not others).
And if they didn’t publish their asset they would have no sales at all.
Until we have Unity 4.6 (with the new awesome Unity GUI), people that want to offer packages to develop full games will naturally have a tendency towards building on what others have created. Personally, I avoid NGUI and especially with 2D support, the need for Toolkit2D probably is significantly reduced. But maybe the author started creating his package before Unity 2D was supported.
It’s very simple: If you don’t want to buy a package, don’t buy it. If you want to have a package that currently has dependencies without those dependencies, kindly ask the author if they would consider developing that. Don’t expect them to deliver - but some actually might (in general, unless you’re one of the really lucky publishers, developing for the Asset Store isn’t particularly profitable, so people have to consider careful how much time they invest into their packages).
Well I kinda understand where he’s coming from.as my own games are often delayed in development whilst I save to buy assets. However, most asset developers that use NGUI in their assets do so because uGUI, whilst not really as bad as it is made out to be, currently does not have the equivalent functionality of NGUI or 2Dtoolkit which provide atlassing capabilities for sprites and textures, and this is not accessible in the free version of Unity. By requiring these other packages the devlopers basically set up a system that makes sure drawcalls are optimised and you can get a viable game out of it. If these kits just used uGUI you would find that a city builder game could not be developed because you couldn’t reduce drawcalls in the free version of unity, so it is actually quite a reasonable thing for the developers to do when one takes that into consideration . In theory you could alter the city builder kit and remove the references to NGUI and 2DToolkit, but the cost in time to do that does not make sense when compared with the cost of the packages and you would still have the drawcall problem.
This is why I sell my own asset… I don’t really do it to make a bunch of money. I use a good share of the asset store income to buy software to play around with and other assets. Now I’m just a hobbyist so I don’t have the time constraints, but it’s still a good avenue to look at.
So annoying… cant believe its allowed to sell butter without butter knife.
OP: I actually understand you. I am annoyed sometimes when asset requires Unity Pro for example just because navmesh, while they could be using for example aron’s astar. But i still allow them to sell their assets
I’m not saying I agree with the poster 100% I just appreciate the sentiment. But a great many things on the asset store don’t make oodles of money for the developer and making assets is always a risk so I can understand why it is an attractive proposition to make use of an asset like NGUI, otherwise to allow unity free users to make a game the developers of the kits would need to make a built in atlassing tool etc or suffer the ire of people expecting a full monty toolkit, which is a bit much to expect when paying $50 for an asset that if it sold only 5 copies would not recover the cost of making it. Not to mention that one doesn’t actually need any of these kits, and what it comes down to is that one spends the time to make them and the game or one spends the cash to speed development but it costs in either case.
Just for the record: uGUI isn’t even available to the public, yet. It will be released with Unity 4.6 which is currently in beta. You’re probably referring to UnityGUI, the old immediate mode GUI system that was introduced in Unity in version 2 (IIRC). uGUI is absolutely awesome and once that’s released (shouldn’t take too long now), there’s really no more reason to use a tool like NGUI. NoesisGUI will still be quite useful because it offers vector based GUIs (uGUI is still pixel-based) - but that’s about the only GUI package I see still making money after 4.6.
Regarding atlasing: That’s actually available in Unity since 4.3 when they introduced 2D support.
You’re not crazy. I agree with you. Requiring either 2DToolkit OR Ngui would be fine and still give you a very large target audience. But requiring BOTH isn’t so good. Actually I’m pretty unsure if 2D Toolkit is still widely used when Unity 2D stuff has been out for awhile. There’s probably a reason it’s still a good seller (don’t know why though). We have it too. But we don’t use it anymore.
