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 3 implemented graphics objects (SDLGraphics, OpenGLGraphics and AllegroGraphics) and 2 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.

Guichan is designed for games. This means that Guichan lacks many features of more advanced GUI libraries (such as GTK, 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.

External links

• http://guichan.sourceforge.net/