Looking for a C++ GUI library in which you can design fancy GUIs (like for games),

Question

Looking for a C++ GUI library in which you can design fancy GUIs (like for games), something in which you can make something beautiful (rounded buttons with rollover effects, embed beautiful background graphics, cool and colorful scrollbars and progress bars, etc.)

It needs to be open source & allowed to be used in proprietary software. Should be also cross-platform, and shouldn´t need to be linked to thousands of libraries or days to get the compiler configured to run even for small samples.

I hope I´m not asking too much

I tried CEGUI and I wasn´t convinced — it was tricky and I compiled the samples but they didn´t run on some computers.

QuickGUI seems to need OGRE (tell me if I´m wrong), which I don´t want to learn now.

Navi needs GeckoRuntime, which ist too big for my project!

wxWidgets doesn´t seem to be focused on design but on functionality (tell me if I´m wrong)

Answer 1

Try GTK+ or Qt, although it's more of a framework than a library. Both are widely used GUI toolkits. Hope that helps.

Answer 2

GuiChan? http://guichan.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Features

I haven't personally used it yet, but will intend to use it on a game I'm currently working on.

Answer 3

Scaleform is a commerical solution.

http://www.scaleform.com/products/clik

Many people tell me good things about it.

Answer 4

You might want to take a look at Qt. You can probably do much of what you are asking for using Qt. More specifically take a look at these features in Qt

• CSS Customizations of Qt Widgets
• QtOpenGL for 3D graphics ( if you need 3D graphics and need to embed Qt Widgets into a 3D environment).
• QGraphicsView for combining multiple widgets in different ways

When you download Qt, it comes with a set of demos. You can take a look at these demos and other examples and re-use the concepts of the parts you like.

I have worked with Qt quite a bit and I can confidently say that you can achieve just about anything you can imagine.

Answer 5

I believe libRocket is designed with game user interfaces in mind.

http://www.librocket.com/

Its based on HTML/CSS which, in my opinion, is an excellent way to define a user interface.