koobas.hobune.stream
Free Gui solutions
Hello! I'm starting with the menu of my app, but some people tell me that OnGui is going to make my app slow and they tell me that it is very hard to use. I dont have money to buy Ngui, ezGui or some plugin like those. I want to know if there are some other free solutions for GUI. I hope you can help me. :D.
IMHO the best GUI is no GUI at all. Just make GUI elements in the main engine like everything else in your game, but parent them to the camera and put them on a layer that draws over the background.
Use TextMeshes for all the text, textured quads or 3d models for the button and dialogs, use ray cast to box colliders to detect user clicks, do all the hide-show-transtion animations with the Animation component, and make a custom script that handles all the logic. That's what I'm doing- in a way it's a lot of work, but never having to deal with OnGUI call makes it worth the trouble.
I absolutely agree with this answer (upvoted). From memory there is a free version of NGUI that is watermarked. When starting out, I used UIToolkit : http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/87917-Prime31-UIToolkit-$$anonymous$$ulti-Resolution-GUI-Solution-Ready-for-Use-and-it-s-free
thank you for your answer, i'll take your advice. It means a extra hard work but...worth it. :D
If you want free, use the inbuilt GUI. It's not hard to use. It can slow your game down when used for in-game GUIs (scores, HUDs etc.) because it uses several drawcall passes, but there are many other things that could also kill performance (poor shaders, physics, dodgy algorithms...), so I personally wouldn't worry about it - it's fine for static menus.
There is a new GUI being introduced sometime in the Unity 4.x release cycle, and I personally wouldn't pay for any alternative package before then.
