I experienced the same pains you've come up against.

The pain never really subsided until I chose to write for the web and was able to use the DOM/JQuery.

Have you thought about using Java to achieve dual platforms?

I believe that it would be able to handle the game you have described.

Have you thought about using Java to achieve dual platforms?

I believe that it would be able to handle the game you have described.

I suppose looking into Java would be worth a shot. Java is the only other language and toolkit that can work across platforms and that I don't have to pay for. Java is also nicer than C++ - though verbose - so wrapping it in a higher level scripting language like Squirrel may be less necessary.

If I do go the Java route I'd likely use libgdx. In addition to the usual game library features, libgdx promises a built-in GUI package.

Netbeans has a interface builder under the form generator.

That would use Swing though, wouldn't it? It doesn't strike me as especially game oriented.

You can't use Swing components inside OpenGL.

TWL (Themeable Widget Library) do works with OpenGL in Java using LWJGL as the wrapper for OGL calls. Which means that where LWJGL works (Windows, Linux and Mac as far as I know), TWL works too. For Android I you need to implement an OGL ES renderer, TWL site says that you can use libGDX for that.

You might want to give it a shot, the site has webstart apps to demo some stuff, and a GUI editor to download.

You're not *supposed* to use Swing components inside OpenGL.

Much like every other GUI toolkit, however, if you jump through enough hoops you can render Swing into a bitmap and stream it to a texture (i.e. what Awesomium/Berkelium do for web content). I had a Scala demo lying around that did this, but I seem to have misplaced it...

That said, I don't view writing a GUI from scratch to be all that complex. I've written a number (both on the side and professionally), and as long as you have a handle on measure, layout, input dispatch, and atlased rendering, it's at most a couple of weeks work.

I have been rolling my own IMGUI, quite simple and effective.

You are very welcome to try my library called SQUID (http://www.ionstar.org/?page_id=4)

There's a user forum here (http://www.ionstar.org/forum/), which i check daily.
It's engine-independent - you implement your own renderer. (it comes with renderer examples)

It has a lot of features and is easily extendable.

Source code is not publically available, but generally there is no need to have it.

You can implement anything you desire by just inheriting the baseclass Control.

There's also a Unity version in the beta phase right now (http://www.ionstar.org/?page_id=8)

Have fun!

You are very welcome to try my library called SQUID (http://www.ionstar.org/?page_id=4)

Thanks for the suggestion. Though it's C# only, while I need something that's C/C++ so that I can have versions for both Mac and Windows (I'm not using Unity).

Might I suggest using MonoGame, it is a port of XNA and uses .NET on Windows/Windows Phone or Mono on MacOS/Linux/iOS/Android/OUYA/PS Mobile. Covers almost all the platforms you will ever need.

Mobile platforms need a paid version of MonoTouch if you have a big game and/or you want to sell your game -- I guess won't be a problem for you, since you're not going commercial.

http://monogame.codeplex.com/

Here are some GUI libraries that might help, if you chose C#:

- http://xui.codeplex.com/ - (my recommendation) It's simple, robust and highly optimised. I find this ideal for games because it is so light-weight.

- http://nuclexframework.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Nuclex.UserInterface&referringTitle=Home - this one is really advanced. This might just be for you if you have complex GUI in your game. Claims to have 100% test coverage on its code.

- http://neoforce.codeplex.com/ - another super complex GUI system.

Only pain I see for you is the porting process, and (very) rarely there will be a feature in MonoGame that has not yet been ported fully, so that will pose an interesting challenge, but you have full access to the source code, feel free to modify it as you develop your game (like I did).

Have fun!

I feel your pain and also ended up going with libRocket for my work. As you say, the forums and the main library seem pretty dead but in general I find there are enough relatively active branches with specific fixes and such that I've had little problem making it do pretty much everything I want. Not to mention the code itself is pretty clean, I've managed to hack up some fixes for x64 and a couple other things without much real effort. I bound Lua, mostly complete, into the framework so the events are able to call any Lua bound C/C++ functions hooked into the Lua state. It makes using the library a snap, just add in "OnClick="GameEngine.DoSomething()" to your RML and away you go.

The only real issue I have had was porting the renderer's to OsX. The example I found was out of date and used deprecated functionality so the compiled geometry would fail. I also fixed that up a while back so you may be interested in those changes. Everything is up on https://code.google.com/p/a8u-tutorial-sources/ if you want to take a look. I have some cleanup to perform and the current test is pretty stupid but it excercises much of the needed items. Let me know if you have any questions, I've been working on something else rencently but intend to get back to it in the next week or so.

GUI in general is trouble for me, but GUI and 3D games... words fail to describe my disappointment! I've been looking at CEGUI for a while, last time I approached it I set up myself to crack it but later figured out I couldn't make it as I had to put the whole project on hold. My main grief about it is that there has been a time in which its documentation did read as "OMG WE HAS LUA EVRYWR!!1!". While the emphasis is gone now I still think all this fuss about GUI and scripting is overhyped as many people really needs much less.

Except me apparently. In that regard I don't share much positive thinking about IMGUIs either.

For various reasons, I'm now looking at web services and moving some of my systems to HTML5+JS. Workflow interop will be a problem, but hopefully nothing JSON cannot solve.

But for in-game I still feel lost; having whole web browsers doing HTML/JS appears exceedingly overkill for any use.

You commented on my thread regarding mine that I am making myself. I appreciate your insight and suggestions. I am not working on it, per se, but I still get the source files out and play with it over weekends.

Hrm, like you I found that libRocket was the most acceptable GUI I could find.

Did you have any other issues with it other than the development is pretty dead? What would you prefer out of a GUI or what how do you think a GUI should work?

Maybe this could be a discussion on the forums...

Did you have any other issues with it other than the development is pretty dead? What would you prefer out of a GUI or what how do you think a GUI should work?

I think the biggest issue was wrapping my head around how libRocket's HTML-ness works.

At one point I thought I'd render my game world then render a GUI on top. libRocket would rather I create a custom HTML element (actually, a custom RML element) that would render my game and place that inside an HTML/RML file, like a regular div element.

Though when I think about it that kind of makes sense anyway, since the "game world" may not necessarily take up the entire screen background. CRPGs of a certain age are remembered for only using one quarter of the whole screen for depicting the game world for instance.

Here comes a new challenger :)

Today has been released an XAML based GUI called NoesisGUI, the website says that it's multiplatform and looks pretty well:

How it looks:

https://twitter.com/noesisengine/status/357288229478735872

Features:

http://www.noesisengine.com/noesis_gui_features.htm

Has someone tested it??

In case anyone is using SharpDX, DirectX11 and Direct2D have a look at my very own library. It's the latest iteration of a project that started way back in the age of MDX. It is designed to be skinnable, it accepts both Windows Forms and Windows 8 input. It uses Direct2D to do the rendering so it doesn't need any artist-drawn art. For the moment it is being released under the GPLv3 license

On the Github repository you will also find a sample to display the UI shown in the post I linked.

Here comes a new challenger

Today has been released an XAML based GUI called NoesisGUI, the website says that it's multiplatform and looks pretty well:

How it looks:

https://twitter.com/noesisengine/status/357288229478735872

Features:

http://www.noesisengine.com/noesis_gui_features.htm

Has someone tested it??

It's commercial, and it doesn't even seem to have a freeware "indie" or "student" license, so it wouldn't really suit my own project.

Though with the state of GUI libraries now, if you're running a commercial product that you want to make a living off of, something definitely could be said about paying for a GUI library.

As long as you're only interested in simple UI (Confirmation dialogs, name entry, etc.), libRocket isn't too bad, but once you start implementing more serious dialogs (listviews, etc.) there is a lot of missing functionality.

The best UI I've found, assuming you're targeting Windows and don't need in-game UIs, is DuiLib:

https://code.google.com/p/duilib/

It's easy to skin.

It would be ideal for a game editor, as the dialogs are created as separate windows. It also includes an editor which is useful for laying out the controls. Unfortunately the editor doesn't properly save all properties, requiring that you hand edit the XML to customize the control.

Here's a link that explains parts of DuiLib (It's in Chinese, but the translation is good enough to work from):

http://www.cnblogs.com/Alberl/tag/duilib%E5%85%A5%E9%97%A8%E6%95%99%E7%A8%8B/

You could look at my project Turbo Badger.
It's not well known yet as this is the first announcment i do (and i just recently open sourced it).

It's zlib license and open source, so use it basically as you like, and of course feel free to contribute ;)

The coding style ("old-school" C++, but with a tad of C++11 if supported by compiler) is chosen to have virtually no dependencies, and make it easy to integrate into any existing game engine, with implementable interfaces for rendering, font systems etc. (defaults implementations are provided too).

Some features:
A very powerful skin system that supports multiple DPI buckets, conditions (think CSS selectors), automatically pack texture atlas among other things.
There's also touch friendly scrolling, layouting, possibility to spec UI in resource files and many other things...

There's more info on the github page.

You could look at my project Turbo Badger.

I'm looking forward to digging into this project. It looks like it may work well as an in-game UI for some stuff I'm working on.

Edit: I downloaded the project and was able to compile it.

Excellent job, The list of controls is extensive and well implemented, the data source stuff looks easy enough to use, and the code looks very clean and easy to extend, if needed.

tinyfiledialogs on sourceforge has several modal function calls. It's a simple C C++ cross-platform file to add to your project. It has no init and no main loop.