You probably mean Window and WindowRenderer hierarchies and I must agree on that point. This is definitely an area to improve. Other than that I don't recall parallel inheritance in CEGUI.

CrazyEddie is doing some research and we might move to a slightly different paradigm in 0.9, we want to have widget behaviors to allow easy creation of very specific widgets. To move away from the old school consistent GUI.

[quote name='NineYearCycle' timestamp='1311334490' post='4838855']
Specific issues would be with from experience almost 5 years ago but ok, at the time it was the amount of boilerplate code, the raw nature of the signal/slot schema (i.e; no helpful abstractions/wrappers), the already mentioned documentation, setting up the styles and overloads for them was also a pain at the time, back then there wasn't much of a GUI editor either so everything we did was done by hand editing xml files.

As for LibRocket, its simple to use which means you get going right away, you might hit issues later on but that's really an issue caused by attempting to use it for very complex GUIs and in all the games I've worked on that hasn't ever been an issue. As for page vs screen, that's almost a semantic argument. It allows for sub-windows, links to other pages (as you'd expect from HTML), scrolling/movable windows etc, beyond that
and you should be looking into more fully fledged GUI systems like QT, wxWidgets and maybe even CEGUI.

My apologies if CEGUI has improved drastically (in the last 5 years) but given the comments from others above I'm not inclined to believe that it has. Changed, undoubtedly, of course but the same issues of up front complexity have been put forward by others, the steep learning curve, the editor still having issues, the doc's being almost unusable... this is all stuff we mentioned to the team 5 years ago.

If you're looking for a much easier to use and regularly updated UI then I'de recommend LibRocket far far far higher than CEGUI.

I didn't realize libRocket was still being regularly updated. There isn't much listed on their website. I had looked into it briefly, and ruled it out due to the use of HTML. I had assumed the use of HTML for the UI would mean the displayed UI would be static and hard to change on the fly. But now that I think about it, it probably isn't all that different from the XML layout files used by CEGUI. I'll have to give it another look.

I wish there was a comparison between libRocket and CEGUI somewhere. Without any experience in using UI libraries, I feel like my decision will boil down to a comparison of features and majority opinions from other people. As Nanoha said, the fact that a published game uses CEGUI makes it feel like the safer option, but that is mostly a lack of knowledge about the benefits of the alternatives.

You are not reinventing the wheel... you are learning.