How to draw texture to screen in Unity?

Question

I'm looking for a way to draw textures to screen in Unity in a similar fashion to XNA's SpriteBatch.Draw method. Ideally, I'd like to write a few helper methods to make all my XNA code work in Unity. This is the first issue I've faced on this seemingly long journey.

I guess I could just use quads, but I'm not so sure it's the least expensive way performance-wise. I could do that stuff in XNA anyway, but they made SpriteBatch not without a reason, I believe.

So I see there is some sort of GUI notation in Unity. Maybe I could efficiently draw everything using it?

Answer 1

Unity has an offical Wiki page on just this - a full blown SpriteManager. It does a lot more than just "draw textures" but it'll do what you want with batching. And it'll give quite a bit of flexibility. Give it a try.

Answer 2

As already mentioned by Vaughan the most popular free 2D framework for Unity is SpriteManager. However another widely used 2D graphics framework is 2D Toolkit; that's the one my company is using. It costs money, but it's not much and the framework has more features than SpriteManager, like tools to generate sprite atlases.

ADDITION: I just successfully displayed images loaded from the web, here's the code

  StartCoroutine(DownloadImage());
  ...

private IEnumerator DownloadImage() {
  WWW www = new WWW("http://www.server.com/image.png");
  yield return www;

  GameObject sprite = tk2dSprite.CreateFromTexture(www.texture, tk2dRuntime.SpriteCollectionSize.ForTk2dCamera(), new Rect(0, 0, 300, 150), Vector2.zero);
  sprite.transform.position = new Vector3(50, 500, -1000);
}

(because I had an older version of 2D Toolkit installed I had to do this in order for this to work; I believe the latest versions don't have this issue)