I was looking through the SDK doc dor DX and samples and I was wondering about the UI. Has anyone used this feature? Is it anygood or would I do better to build my own gui system?

I was looking at the custom UI code, its over 7000 lines of code (which is neither alot nor trival). Anyway it seems they are using the windows message pump to send events to down the pipeline... To make it better you might want to make the UI platform independant, loadable from xml.

Alot of people like Crazy Eddie's GUI.
http://www.cegui.org.uk

To develop your own GUI has the added advantage of you being able to modify it, knowing exactly what it does and how to use it. The problem is its going to take you a good while to code up a gui system, and even more time to debug it. Do you want to spend all that time writing your own gui system rather then making a game.

The DirectX UI actually works really well... provided what you want is a fairly generic Windows32 style GUI. It gives you support for menus, comboboxs, edits, buttons, and most of the features available to you in MFC through a fairly clean wrapper, and gives you the option to change their appearance. But like all things, it depends on what you're using it for. If what I've described doesn't sound like what you need, then you're best to create your own - thus bypassing any extra includes and libs which will simply end up increasing the size of your project.

-HeavyBlade

Thanks alot. I just wanted to make a simple gui for my games. I would also like to be able to let the user enter their own text. And in the dx example it was able to let the user enter and then display the text the user entered. Which I thought was really cool.