As part of our Unity 4.3 announcement here at Unite ’13, we’re thrilled to show off our native support for 2D development. Our users have been making 2D games for many years at this stage, and we felt it was about time we stepped up and acknowledged that fact, and brought native support for Sprites and related 2D workflows to Unity.
With the knowledge that Unity users love making 2D games in Unity – evidenced by some incredible titles (see BattleHeart, Tumbledrop, Ski Safari, Bad Piggies, Year Walk, to name but a few) as well as some fantastic tools in our Asset Store – we decided to look at how to make the Unity workflow you already know and better support 2D. In future you’ll see a lot more in these tools, but as part of the first release you can expect features such as -
New Sprite type, with an editor that will auto slice your 2D graphics for you
Upgraded Animation window with Dopesheet style view and quicker parameter animation
Integration with the Animator to easily create states for 2D animated characters
An integrated 2D physics engine with rigidbodies, colliders, joints
We have also created a demo project to show our beta users how they can make a game with these new tools. Our Learn team has created this in much the same way we expect users to use our 3D tools, so we hope it’ll be both familiar and reassuring to those wondering how these 2D workflows make sense in a 3D engine.
We look forward to seeing what you create with these new tools and workflows in Unity, have fun!
More Flexible Static Batching: ex2D’s own Static Batching allows you to define static sprites and render them at lightning speed during runtime.
Customizable Dynamic Batching: ex2D’s own Dynamic Batching allows you define the size of each mesh batch, so you can use different batching strategy according to the bottle neck of your project’s performance.
2D Scene Editor: Create and edit your scene in the real 2D fashion! Everything here is 2D and what you see is what you get, plus a whole bunch of tools for sprites manipulating.
Revolutionary Layer system: Managing batching, render order and hierarchy structure has never been easier.
Improved Atlas Editor: Now supports sprite rotates, texture compression option and import atlas from tools like TexturePacker.
Team Collaboration Ready: ex2D 2.0 changed the way how asset management work. Say goodbye to the pesky DB files we used in ex2D 1.X. Now textures are managed through TextureInfo, an asset type that you can easily put under version control.
NGUI is a powerful UI system and event notification framework for Unity (both Pro and Free, 3.4.2f3 or higher) written in C#. It features clean code and simple, minimalistic approach to everything. Most classes are kept under 200 lines of code. For a programmer this means a much easier time when it comes to working with the kit — from extending its functionality to tweaking the existing one. For everyone else this means better performance, smaller footprint, and less memory overhead — all of which ultimately save you money.
Features:
Full Inspector integration
No need to hit Play to see the results
What you see in the Scene view is what you get in the Game view (fully WYSIWYG)
Component-based, modular nature: attach the behaviours you want to make your widgets do what you want without having to code (with a variety of templates to get you started)
Full support for iOS/Android, Flash (with exception of input -- it's not supported in Flash).
Flexible event system
Make complex UIs that take only 1 draw call
Create your atlases right in the editor, update/modify them at will, or import an atlas from the Texture Packer.
Support for lighting, normal mapping, refraction, and more — unleash your creativity!
Support for clipped panels with hard or soft edges.
An assortment of useful scripts to help you — from changing a button color to dragging an object
Simple built-in tweening system.
Support for eastern languages with IME input.
Clean, short, simple and extensively optimized C# code
No DLLs or external resources
The kit comes bundled with 11 step-by-step tutorials, 11 examples, and 3 video tutorials, all of which can be found herewithout having to buy the kit.
The 3rd example in particular is very advanced and not only has a system for random item level +quality generation, but also a full Inspector integration for data entry. Even the way you define stats on the items has been simplified -- you define all items with stats as if they were max level, then specify actual item range that the created items will be constrained with.
The kit is currently available for $95 up on the Asset Store, as well as directly via PayPal. You can rationalize the purchase like this: will NGUI save you or your developers at least 2 hours of work? If yes, then you have nothing to lose by grabbing a copy.
An alternative Professional edition version can be obtained for $200 that comes with a personal access to NGUI’s GIT repository, giving you access to all of its revision history, the ability to easily merge/diff selective revisions, and always be up to date. It's very useful for those who plan on modifying NGUI's source to suit their own needs, but still wish to have a hassle-free way of staying up to date. You can find more information here.
All methods come with quick support via email, forums, and Skype and provide free updates.
