I want to start drawing a more advanced GUI and HUD in my little game, and I'm looking for good solutions...

How are GUI and HUD in AAA games usually drawn? Do they use Direct3D or Direct2D? Or different solutions?

I know there this CEGUI... are there similar systems?

I want to start drawing a more advanced GUI and HUD in my little game, and I'm looking for good solutions...

How are GUI and HUD in AAA games usually drawn? Do they use Direct3D or Direct2D? Or different solutions?

I know there this CEGUI... are there similar systems?

This is actually no small subject. For a "lot" of games, and the last 3 I've shipped (well, 2 and almost shipped current one ), we've been using Scaleform. This has some benefits, a number of pitfalls and of course the cost is not trivial. The benefits of Scaleform are that you get to use standard Flash tools to create your gui's, preview them, tweak them etc. The downfalls, flash in general sucks for performance and rendering speed so you have to be extremely careful and enforce that certain features are not used. The list of games using Scaleform is not short, it has almost become a defacto for most AAA games anymore and folks know what to avoid and how to optimize it so that tends to temper the downsides.

As to the other available options. CEGUI is probably the strongest in the open source space now and there are a number of examples of it in commercial games, of course the most notable is probably Torchlight but there are plenty of others. Depending on your needs, even CEGUI can be complete overkill, does your game really need anything other than buttons and options screens? If so it may be the right choice, if on the other hand you just need a couple selections and buttons, rolling your own may be completely valid and can provide performance benefits since it likely won't need an entire support framework integrated.

As to rendering, Direct2D is unfortunately not available outside of DX10/11 which would limit the audience to Vista or Win7 so I doubt anyone is seriously using it as of yet. Basically setting up the GUI and rendering it in D3D is fairly trivial and as such the most common way to go.

Thanks for you answer, it was really helpful...

Scaleform looks amazing... Can I use it as an indie developer?

P.S. Should I use CEGUI or Scaleform to develop my world editor UI?

Scaleform is going to cost a fair amount, so probably not, no