NGUI Depth Master

NGUI Depth Master is a small editor extension that can be used to set the depth values of NGUI panels and widgets in the order they appear in the scene hierarchy. Additionally it has the features of searching for a panel or a widget at a specific depth value and finding the highest and lowest depth panel and widgets.

All the functions work on the hierarchy selection. The selected item is used as the starting point of the operation and all the children of the selected is iterated until the operation is done. This way you can isolate parts of your UI to operate on.

So in short with the NGUI Depth Master you can:

• Set the depth order of a whole UI or the sub-part of a UI based on hierarchy order
• Search for a widget or a panel with a depth value of your choice
• Find the highest or the lowest depth item in the whole UI or the selected sub-part of it
• Ability to skip the items with negative depth values (This way their draw order becomes independent of their place in the hierarchy)
• Undo any changes made
• Do it all instantly, even in very crowded and complex UI hierarchy trees with hundreds of widgets

As an added bonus, this extension will also report how many panels and widgets it operated on after the operation is complete.

In NGUI, manually created panels and widgets all have the default depth value of 0. Also when panels or widgets or duplicated, they retain the same depth value of the original they are copied from. These two problems result in hours upon hours of depth tweaking throughout a project's development lifetime due to draw order problems. Not to mention that the "Widgets share the same depth value of" warning in the inspector is mildly frustrating, especially if you are prone to OCD. So having a tiny utility that easily fixes all these problems with a single button click was the idea behind this extension and the results have been well worth the effort.