Hi All,

I am new to NoesisGUI. I am trying to get a better idea of all that is supported, mostly as it relates to Unity5, but am open to learning about what's available via some of the other game engines.

As a .NET/C# Developer I fell in love with XAML/WPF/Silverlight. Embraced Silverlight and then cursed and cried when MS killed it. My goal is to develop business apps that incorporate game engine features. I tried going down this route a few years ago and ended up abandoning it, now I am back again and think that Unity has come a long way since then especially with its GUI Layout. Obviously, XAML is my first choice and now that the NoesisGUI plugin no longer requires Unity Pro it is even more affordable and more intriguing.

As developers we are constantly having to research and lookup documentation on the frameworks that we use. For me, personally, http://stackoverflow.com/ is one of the best places to ask questions and get to the answers quickly.

So far, my biggest gripe is this forum. Not the contents or the people, but the tool itself. It is archaic and not user friendly to use. The search is weak. Although it looks like there is plenty of documentation, it doesn't seem well organized.

Maybe some alternative already exists and I just haven't found it? But if it doesn't, I really think that some upgrade is in order. Again, stackoverflow.com would be my choice mainly because we could tag the questions easily with (NoesisGUI Unity5 C#) or (NoesisGUI OGRE3D) or (NoesisGUI Button Unity5 C#) and so on, letting us get to the information faster. By using something more open and popular like stackoverflow, there would also be more visibility about this project, where people that may have not heard about it but happen to look up some issue with the Unity5 tag would also stumble upon this.

I hope you see this as purely constructive criticism. So far NoesisGUI seems like a hidden gem and I am looking forward to learning more about it.

Thank you!

Although I agree that the forum search leaves a lot to be desired, I am not sure if replacing a forum which is geared toward discussion, with a quesion/answer system is the right choice.

If Noesis is interested in updating their forum software, I would suggest taking a look at Discourse (there is an importer for phpBB).

Here is an example of a Discourse forum: https://discuss.codecademy.com/

It has a lot of features you may like, for example tagging. If it has a stackoverflow feel to it, it was created by a cofounder of stackexchange

I view stackoverflow Q/A style as a cleaned up forum, where the best answer bubbles to the top and saves the researcher time. Nothing stops you from reading all responses, but the important info is moved to the top so that you don't have to do the digging yourself. But to each his own, your point about discussion makes sense and that Discourse software looks interesting. I think the tagging feature is invaluable to organize all of that information.

This forum might be perfectly fine for some people. I am used to developing business apps and there time is money and the boss really just wants to see productivity. I am not into tinkering with this stuff for pure fun. For example, I am currently pushing 20 hours at this desk and I think that if the information was organized better it could have saved me hours today.

For what it's worth (probably not much) I will share my "first" impression based on today. I say first in quotes because I actually bought this license 3 years ago. Struggled to get things to work (and documentation was the issue) so after a while I decided that it was simply too risky to try to build a commercial product around this. Mainly, because I need to be productive and in order to do so there better be a lot of resources somewhere to draw upon and because there seemed to be a lack of information, it is a huge risk to plunge into it and find our months later that something that I need to do is either not possible or it is crashing in production.

So, now I am looking at building a business app with Unity again. I first went and checked to see the status of this plugin. When I saw that it was "free" I thought, shit, it is dead. Then I read the description and that package says it is free and only works with Unity4 and to contact Noesis for info.

Some questions that I have:
Why is the old free package in the Unity store but not the updated Unity5 package?

In this forum, why are there 800 topics to go through, why aren't they at least grouped by the game engine, so if I am only a Unity guy, I don't waste time reading about issues with OGRE3D?

How many people are using NoesisGUI in general and how many Unity developers? (if all the users are registered in this forum then it looks like ~150 unity users and ~100 full license users)

What is the true goal of NoesisGUI or what is their priority?

Which of the supported engines are used the most?

How many developers are working on this full-time?

Is it just the 2 admins? If so, its not the end of the world, the product looks great. But if there are only 2, then that is not much bandwidth and possibly picking one engine or platform to plug into may be the better decision rather than supporting many. The old adage, do one thing but do it really well instead of many things but done not so well.

Xaml is awesome. NoesisGUI takes it to another level (where MS should have taken it, IMO) but this is even better, no need to compete with MS. For 5 years I have been bleeding out of my eyes trying to get web apps to behave like native apps. It has gotten better, but nothing comes close to Xaml. So, to me, NeosisGUI has an amazing opportunity to tap into that market with Unity covering many native platforms mobile/tablet/xbox beating anything that one could do with Html/JS/Cordova and then also tackling the desktop web apps with the HTML5/WebGL deployment. But tackling that would require focus and channeling all resources to few platforms. That is something that I value as a business app developer, but I have no idea what the vision is for Noesis.

So far, my biggest gripe is this forum. Not the contents or the people, but the tool itself. It is archaic and not user friendly to use. The search is weak. Although it looks like there is plenty of documentation, it doesn't seem well organized.

hope you see this as purely constructive criticism. So far NoesisGUI seems like a hidden gem and I am looking forward to learning more about it.

Yes, sure! Thanks a lot for sharing your opinion and for doing it in a constructive way. I am really sorry about your problems with the forum. I agree with you, we installed phpbb years ago and didn't have the time to change to a better alternative. I would say that 95% of our energy has been in the development side. Although it is an inconvenience, we think it is not critical. In fact, oculus forums for example were phpbb since the beginning, it seems they changed it not long time ago.

We are working in a new website. I don't know if the first version will upgrade the forums (because our permission system for downloading is based on phpbb) But we will do it!

If Noesis is interested in updating their forum software, I would suggest taking a look at Discourse (there is an importer for phpBB).

Thanks a lot for the suggestion! Taking note about it.

Why is the old free package in the Unity store but not the updated Unity5 package?

Because we are not longer selling the package in the Unity Asset Store. The license is very restrictive to us. But instead of leaving the store we decided to give the previous version for free. In fact, as soon as 1.3 is out we will upload 1.2 to the store (for free).

In this forum, why are there 800 topics to go through, why aren't they at least grouped by the game engine, so if I am only a Unity guy, I don't waste time reading about issues with OGRE3D?

Many times questions are not strictly related to an engine and we want everybody to read everything. Even if you are not using OGRE, for example, there may be interesting discussions for a Unity3D developer. Right now, we are getting around 2-5 messages per day. The bandwidth is low enough to maintain a single forum. But, of course this is going to change.

How many people are using NoesisGUI in general and how many Unity developers? (if all the users are registered in this forum then it looks like ~150 unity users and ~100 full license users)

User registered is not a good indicator of real users because there are many (75%) Unity users that never registered here and because big companies use private support. Sometimes we ask them to post interesting questions in the forum though.

There are aroung 1000 NoesisGUI licenses out there.

What is the true goal of NoesisGUI or what is their priority?

Goal: becoming the 1st UI middleware for videogames and apps.
Priority: videogames right now. We are not a application framework (like Xamarin for example). We are a lighweight, portable and very efficient middleware to be used in well-known of private engines.

Which of the supported engines are used the most?

Unity right now. But the Unreal version is almost ready (beta aligned with 1.3) and that could change things a lot. There are also many customers (normally big studios) using proprietary technology.

How many developers are working on this full-time?

Three developers working fulltime and a few more not working exclusively for us. Three programmers working full time is a lot of bandwidth to generate code but right now is insufficient and we are looking for ways to expand the team.

We hope to provide more information about it... soon

jsantos, thank you for addressing all of my questions and for the prompt reply!