Wartbed:GUI evaluation
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Currently evaluated GUI frameworks
GUI systems are relatively complex beasts (which I know having designed a few!) and are good candidates for 3rd party libraries. Requirements are
- Sufficiently feature-complete (no half-complete or starting frameworks)
- Stable
- Maintained
- OGRE-integrated
Note that the screenshots below are not necessarily representative of the appearance of the frameworks since they all support skinning.
CEGUI
http://www.cegui.org.uk/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
CEGUI is the default GUI framework under OGRE. I had considerable problems getting it to work, though it was reasonably simple once everything was described (a situation of files all over the place without a meaningfuil structure in OGRE - would need some cleaning up). Also, the available support and guides are scarce. It is also rather clumsy to initialise, if perhaps not to work with.
- It seems the most powerful GUI library by far.
- It has bindings for Irrlicht and OpenSceneGraph so it might be considered a relatively inter-API-portable framework.
QuickGUI
http://www.ogre3d.org/wiki/index.php/QuickGUI
Made for OGRE, inspired by BetGUI and CEGUI. It seems reasonably complete and is the framework I've gotten furthest with so far.
MyGUI
http://www.ohloh.net/p/my-gui
Last updated in June 2008. MyGUI is a sleek and sufficiently feature-complete framework that is well prepared for integration into OGRE. However, it myst be compiled from source (which is a one-time occurrence, though) and depends in turn on FreeType2, which also must be compiled. This meant initial only hassle, but since the current version seems to be written to a pre-Shoggoth OGRE version I've yet to get it to compile (some invalid signatures and a bunch of unresolved externals).
OpenGUI
http://opengui.rightbracket.com/
Screenshots
OpenGUI seems like a nice GUI library. However, it seems not to be updated anymore (last official optade was in 2007), which might mean severe integration issues with OGRE.
GUIs to be checked and perhaps evalutated
- BetaGUI
- Navi - uses the Gecko engine to render HTML and XML into OGRE. Very powerful (supports JavaScript and AJAX, but might be slow and very, very overkill. Also not necessarily easier to design game interfaces in HTML)
