Unity3D 4 Game Engine - New GUI

We all know that Unity3D is an amazing game engine. We also know that its existing GUI system sucks. However Unity 4 promises to resolve this issue by introducing an all new GUI system. Yes! Finally we can breathe easy and gain those frame rates we struggle with on the mobile devices.


The following link gives a demonstration of this new GUI system. http://blogs.unity3d.com/2012/06/29/the-new-gui/. It is however not clear when it shall be available to the end user. It is also not clear whether they would completely eliminate the OnGUI calls or retain them for backward compatibility. Sometimes I feel Unity has been unfair in setting its priorities right. Honestly, optimizing the GUI system should have been their first priority and its sad that they had to wait so long to address this.  Anyways the good news is they have finally heard us. I wish they had acted earlier and I could have saved loads of time figuring out ways to get to a descent FPS with the existing GUI or break my head re-doing everything using an alternative tool like NGUI or EZGUI.

So in a nut shell they promise to deliver the following
  • 3D GUI system.
  • Drag and drop the buttons or items you need just like you would with a game object.
  • Sorting
  • Callbacks for events
  • And more.

It may look like they have been inspired by the 1 draw call per UI supported by NGUI or EZGUI and in fact thats what they did but not necessarily sticking to it. Your draw calls could vary depending on your hierarchy. It is however way better than using OnGUI for sure.

Watch David Hagelson give his overview on Unity 4. http://unity3d.com/?overview

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Authoritative Server - MMO

Latency, Authoritative Server, Lag Compensation, Course Correction, Packet Drops and Client Side Prediction. These are things you would worry about when attempting to build a MMO game. For companies where the delay matters these logics are a must. This post is on setting up an Authoritative Server. There are different ways of setting up the authoritative server. Some of them is mentioned here. You have N clients and one client acts as the authoritative server: Imagine N clients with different machine configurations. The server would need to decide the best possible machine and have the physics simulation run in that. We then have issues with client disconnecting in which case we need to swap the authoritative client to another machine. This means we have to maintain all the state the game was in and move it to the new authoritative client. In an online environment this is simple nothing but nonsense. There is a dedicated server which simulates everything including physics and ...
Read more

Code dependencies

Are you struggling to make a given set of scripts from a project compile error free? If that is true, then you are in the same boat as I am right now. I have come across projects where logic is scattered around to get a functionality out of the pipeline with limited value to object oriented programming, and the most valuable and time saving of all is the plugin architecture. This is as best as it can get. Let me explain.. A producer has an idea and wants to make a quick prototype. He opens a new project, drags and drops the packages he needs and boom the game runs. Obviously you don't expect a producer to code (unless he is from development). The game would not be perfect, but at least it would get the ball rolling and you don't need a developer to assist the producer. Now, to do this, you would want the packages to follow a common rule. You can do this using an interface and have classes implement them. For example, the avatar package and the pet package can implement the...
Read more