Guichan is currently in a beta stage. This means that the API is not fixed and may change in the future. Every API change will break compatibility between older versions of Guichan.
Guichan is a C++ GUI library designed for games. It comes with a standard set of 'widgets' and can use several different objects for displaying graphics and capturing user input. Guichan has an abstract design which allows users of Guichan to use different objects for displaying of graphics and grabbing of user input. Guichan comes with three implemented graphics objects (SDLGraphics, OpenGLGraphics and AllegroGraphics) and two implemented input objects (SDLInput and AllegroInput). Due to Guichan's extendible nature, new objects can also be created by the developer to suit their needs. As Guichan is designed for games, Guichan lacks many features of more advanced GUI libraries (such as GTK and QT). However, a game developer may not normally require all the advanced features of the larger GUI libraries. Guichan aims to keep small and simple, thus avoiding the complication and large dependencies found with some other GUI libraries. Guichan is small but contains all basic GUI features making it ideal for games.
Guichan allows the developer control over the initialization of external libraries, giving a degree of freedom which is almost required in game development, but not provided by some GUI libraries. Guichan should not be considered a full GUI library but rather a tool or helper library for game development.
The basic nature of Guichan means that it comes with a small number of default widgets. There exists no themes or theme handling for Guichan, as their implementation would increase the size and complexity of the library unnecessarily. Instead, the developer creates their own new widgets by inheriting from the standard widgets or by overloading standard widget functions. This makes Guichan much more flexible for customisation than theme based GUIs, and more natural to use for C++ developers, as they need only learn the API instead of a whole new theming system.
For more general information about Guichan and/or downloads related to Guichan please visit the Guichan homepage at http://guichan.sourceforge.net.
If you need help with Guichan, the best way to proceed is to ask questions either by joining the users mailing list or by joining our forum. Information about Guichan's mailing lists and our forum is found at the Guichan homepate at http://guichan.sourceforge.net.
If you want to get involved with Guichan development, the best way to proceed is to suggest improvements to Guichan either by joining the developers mailing list or by joining our forum. Information about Guichan's mailing lists and our forum is found at the Guichan homepate at http://guichan.sourceforge.net.
By Olof Naessén 2006-06-30.