UI library for XNA

Question

I'm working on a small and simple XNA game and I'm noticing I'm spending way too much time implementing basic UI functionality like menus, (rich) text rendering including wrapping and basic UI lay-out such as alignment of elements.

This is a fairly common problem, and I was wondering whether anyone knows of a library to handle these things. I know there are some good skinnable options available to windows programmers (Crazy Eddie's GUI comes to mind), but as I'm targeting the Xbox 360 I would like to find a pure managed solution.

Answer 1

There's XNA Simple Gui and xWinForms. They provide some basic GUI elements. Haven't seen any menu components, though.

Answer 2

xWinForms is easily the most complete and actively maintained GUI system for XNA. Window System for XNA (WSX) had some good progress in the past (I was working on it for a while), and is still a decent system, though it hasn't been maintained for over a year now. The best option is definitely to go with xWinForms, at least until WPF interoperability comes along (next version of WPF/XNA?) and makes all the other options effectively obsolete.

Answer 3

Check out the Gamestate Management Example for a game menu example.

NOTE: Last I checked, it wasn't fully functional with XNA 3.0.

Answer 4

Check out SQUID: http://www.ionstar.org/

It's a really clean, fast, and engine independent UI system. I've worked with it extensively and really enjoy using it. The download includes sample code for XNA 3.1, Truevision3D, and SlimDX.