What sort of options are there these days for this sort of thing? I'm looking for a C-compatible API (or D, since that's technically the language I'm using), and the field seems a little sparse. Everyone seems to have fallen in love with IMGUI-style libraries. I can see why; mocking things up with one (imgui in particular, with a somewhat-clunky C binding) was a breeze. However, the presentability of the result leaves a bit to be desired. My game is fairly UI-driven, and I'm looking for something I can skin and animate for that purpose, not so much in the way of tools development.

The place I last worked at used an in-house solution, and it seems like many commercial games use scaleform. Almost everything else I've seen is written in C++, like CEGUI and LibRocket. Is there anything out there that supports C? Should I just build my own? I've heard that's an extremely laborious task.

There's Nuklear. If you want something you can show in your game, you'll probably want to invest some time into creating a skin for it.

Maybe one of should start an open source project for this? would be nice to have something purly written in D :)

If it comes down to that, I probably will. I really hope it doesn't though.

There's Nuklear. If you want something you can show in your game, you'll probably want to invest some time into creating a skin for it.

I see. I'd written it off as being in the same bucket as IMGUI and for tools development. I'm not sure why as I'd seen some of those screenshots before. I'll give it a look, thanks.

There are some static and dynamic D bindings for Nuklear already, so you can jump right in.

The dynamic binding is actually only like 25% finished, and the static binding has given me all sorts of pain due to the the COFF/OMF thing. As much as I love the language, I absolutely hate the linker in the toolchain.

Since both are based on an outdated version of nuklear and aren't getting updated, I decided I might as well just roll my own bindings using your article and the official sources as a reference. Thanks for the heads up though.