Guichan is a GUI library in C++ made especially with games in mind, and it has just been released. We have done our best to create a library that is small, but powerful. The design is somewhat inspired by Java's swing, but without all the bloat (like layout handlers and such).

Main features:
- Modular object-oriented design, with replaceable back-ends for graphics and input. Allegro, OpenGL and SDL is supported out-of-the-box.
- NO themes! Instead of having a complicated theme or skin system to change the appearance of the widget - you just overload the widget's draw method and draw it any way you like.

Screenshots, downloads, documentation and additional information can be found on: http://guichan.darkbits.org/

This is the first version released to the public, so we would really like some feedback on the library, especially the API. At least, it would be very helpful if you could download it, try the examples and tell us if it worked or not.

I fixed the compile error in the source version. If you want to give it another try just download it again.

Edit: Ops! Found another compile error. (I had forgotten to uninstall an old version of Guichan where container.hpp was misplaced, so I didn't notice the errors when I made the test compiles). Hopefully it will now compile without errors.

Nice. I'm dloading it now to see how it compares to the snes RPG GUI lib I've been working on.

No it does not! Guichan never takes over your application. That is one of the main reasons we made Guichan, because most Gui's does that.
But of course, if you want to you could make your game area a widget. The main loop of a Guichan application looks something like this:

while(running)
{
  myGame->logic(); // Your Game
  gui->logic();    // Perform Gui logic such as input
  myGame->draw();  // Draw your game with Allegro or something
  gui->draw();     // Draw the Gui on top of your game graphics
  updateScreen();
}

Thank you for your comments, everyone.

Mandrake:
You should check out the source to the FF Demo on the homepage. I guess it is kind of hard to read (we hacked it together in a weekend, the code is quite messy.. and oh, it is lacking comments), so if you want to I can go through it and clean it up a bit. It also requires some knowledge to how Guichan works, so check out the other examples and the API reference first.

Darn - I was thinking I'd download it and give it a spin, but the download-links don't work

I'm sorry for our server downtime. My internet provider had a malfunction or something. But as far as I know they've fixed it for now so go and download Guichan and give us feedbacks!

Glad you liked it, Torbjörn.

Remember that this is just a first beta version, we are still finding bugs here and there. Expect a new version not too long.

We are terribly sorry for the psychological pain this may have caused you. Anyway, the beautiful part is that demo should be quite easy to port to allegro, as it uses Guichan for drawing and input. (just take out SDL input and graphics objects, and pop in allegro's equivalents)

Extending Guichan to support DirectX should be fairly easy. One just have to implement a DirectX graphics class, a DirectX input class and a DirectX imageloader class. We haven't done it because none of us have enough knowledge of DirectX (and it can take some time before one of us even considers learning DirectX).
If you decide to help us we will be very happy.

Thanks!

Everything I write is open/free source, use it as you wish... just give me the appropriate credits.

Alright, I can probably just steal, I mean, borrow ST's then

Is it possible for people to use it if they want? Not that I want to, I'm just curious at this point

This seems like a beautifully designed GUI, and I especially like it's flexibility! Good job guys!

Nope, all you need to do is to register the png format to allegro. Most allegro PNG plugins do that already, so it should work out of the box once you include the allegro pNG handler.

And I really want to check this lib out, seems to be pretty awsome

I spent a bit of time today looking through the code. Really great. Documented very well. I so rarely find libraries this close to my coding/design preferences. It looks like it will be really easy to do a D3D driver for this. Only one question, when is endPaint to be called? I'm thinking of batching up all of the operations in Graphics in AGP memory/vertex buffers so that I can minimize state changes (ie draw all rectangles followed by all pixels etc). If it is worthwhile I could do it there, although I just realized that it might be pointless because it seems that Guichan sets clip areas for each component when it draws, and if that is the case I doubt I could batch operations as they would all need to be drawn with the same attributes.