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This has been a long time in the making, mainly due to just a complete lack of time.

I’m very close to version 1.3, and a full release, now as well as an Asset Store submission. If you read the Change Logs you can see many of the roadmap features are already implemented in this release. The next step is beefing up the editor and adding a few more features for doing some more complex UI components.

Give it a try, and report any bugs you find!

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[Edit 2-2-11] This project is now dubbed QuadUI. Read more here.

In the 5 Unity games I have worked on so far, there has consistently been one job that has always been, in a best-case scenario, tedious. What I am talking about is 2D UI. The current implementation in Unity (3.1) is less than efficient when doing the 2D elements of a game. Now, I love the ability to do immediate-mode GUI, but when developing for low-end hardware and mobile that isn’t really an option. So the other out-of-the-box option is to use GUITextures, which are not only bad for memory consumption and bandwidth, but eat up those ever-so-important draw calls on our mobile hardware.

A couple other issues with how things are currently:

• No draw call batching for 2D
• Large memory bandwidth due to several uncompressed textures
• No real editor for 2D built-in.

Now there are some fantastic solutions out there for doing 2D in Unity, some of them free, some not so much. What I have seen (and used) though, are not very artist friendly, or very time-efficient for setup. I found myself punching in way too much data into 3rd party classes, which then generated my UI at runtime (On a mobile device that left me a marginal overhead around Awake and Start).

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