Hello, I assume this topic has already been debated, but I'd like to by myself. I know many of us use ScaleForm in order to make ingame GUIs, while others like to use custom tools that rely on Flash as well. On our latest game we decided this wasn't optimal (bad memory usage, bad tesselation, low performances, licensing issues...), so we went into a new direction and decided to make an all-c++ solution.
I find this solution to be flawed as well, as it incredibly bloats the final exe size, doesn't allow any easy tweaking without recompilation and code is only comprehensible to other developers, if infinite lists of constants and properties and other boring code can be called comprehensible at all.

My instinct would suggest me that an event-based windowing system that mimics Visual Basic (or the Win concept in which everything is a window), and that connects nicely to some external script would be the best solution. However, some game-specific issues should be taken into account: graphic style for example is unique to each game, so a sort of CSS should exist, but other things like special effects, sounds and animations should be taken into account as well. I'm no CSS expert, nor I know much about Lua for example, but I'm just wondering if anyone got an opinion about this? How do you guys take care of GUIs? And how should a "perfect" system that adapts decently to different games work for you?

I find this matter very interesting, so I hope to receive interesting comments

Check out the Gwen UI library, its license is MIT, so you can basically do anything with it. Also, the code is very clean and not bloated like every other GUI out there. Check it out at http://code.google.com/p/gwen/

In my opinion, based on what you're saying, you want to use Awesomium, essentially, that should give you all you need. You can use both HTML and CSS with the Webkit library to get the kind of customisation you're looking for. Heres a couple of links to the GUI of a guy who did just that:

http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/05/new-object-palette-window/
http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/10/animation-mixing-ui/


NOTE: I haven't tried this yet, but I will be doing so soon, so I don't know how easy this is to pull off. You could

Thank you all for your replies, I've been looking into your suggestions and I found them very interesting Especially, I did think about using html along with css, but the idea of using berkelium didn't come to me at all