Getting Started

Crazy Eddie's GUI System is a free library providing windowing and widgets for graphics APIs / engines where such functionality is not natively available, or severely lacking. The library is object-oriented, written in C++, cross-platform, MIT-licensed (free and Open Source) and targeted at game and application developers who should be spending their time creating great games and not on building GUI sub-systems! Additionally, it offers a WYSIWYG editor for creating layouts and imagesets.

Get started

If you encounter issues please post them on the forum (follow the posting guidelines!) or on our issue tracker (follow the issue template as much as needed).


Download the last recommended CEGUI release here and watch how to build CEGUI in this video for Microsoft Visual Studio C++ 2010 on our Youtube channel.

Read the beginner's guide to CEGUI carefully to learn how to unleash the craziness of CEGUI.

Activate the application templates in CMake, build them, run them and look at theri code (original news here) . They serve as a minimal example for an application using CEGUI, which can be used as a basis for building your own application. The applications feature input injections, updates and a minimal CEGUI layout. The currently available templates are based on SDL2 and GLFW3, which are required to build the respective template.

Learn more about CEGUI by reading and looking up topics in the official documentation for your version, the how-to and the tutorials. Also you might find more information by searching the wiki and forums. If you cannot find an answer to a question, do not hesitate to ask in the forum. Bug reports can be added and discussed our Issue tracking system on bitbucket.


In addition to the above, we recommend Visual Studio users to check out the video series made by MakingGamesWithBen on youtube, it might be a nicer way to get started. The first one covers CMake installation and building the dependencies and the project. The second video covers the integration of CEGUI into your project, resource initialisation and basic rendering.

Quick tour

These two videos should give you a first impression of the capabilities of CEGUI. To learn more about CEGUI's features we recommend you the features page.

To get a better idea about CEGUI's capabilities you can download the latest stable release the latest code from the "default" (unstable) branch of CEGUI and to build and run our "SampleFramework". For more information on how to acquire the source code you can go here. A video showing how to build CEGUI in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 is available as well. A step-by-step guide for multiple OS is planned and will be available on our site as soon as possible. Until then we recommend you the Wiki and the Documentation for more information.