MechoEcho: Build. Drive. Explore… With Blocks!

[SandDragon]

 


I am the developer of MechoEcho and I wanted to thank the CEGUI dev community for creating (and documenting) the exact UI library I needed. CEGUI and CEED-GUI are an excellent combo that allowed me to create my game interfaces very quickly.

I researched several options and discovered there are very few open source GUI libraries that offer lots of features, flexibility, customization options and a modern implementation with an eye on performance.

When I first started implementing the UI in my game I was swayed by some ill-informed comments I saw online, and started with a different GUI library. That library took me 90% of the way and then – right when I got to the advanced stuff – it started showing its design and performance limitations (for example, poor performance when the content displayed by the UI was being updated, insufficient support for in-game windows, lack of good authoring tools). Switching to CEGUI removed all these obstacles.

CEGUI may take a bit longer than (some) other solutions to build and get started, but personally I find the additional time spent at the beginning is more than made up for by the speed and ease of authoring provided by the library and tools. CEGUI allows me to design interfaces very quickly, so a few hours spent reading the manual and choosing my compilation options were absolutely worth it. Also, most of CEGUI dependencies are optional and pretty much nothing is forced on you. Options are a good thing!

The final, polished art for my GUI is still in the making, so the user interface is not prominently showcased in current pictures and videos, but I will post more images in the future. For now, I just wanted to provide a testimonial that may be helpful to people that are trying to choose what GUI library to use.



http://www.mechoecho.com/
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =261604190

[Ident]

Thanks for telling us about your project. Our project-page is currently not finished but we will definitely add this project when the page goes live!

I am sorry you are unhappy with the time CEGUI takes to build and get started. However, once it is known how to do it, CEGUI only takes a few minutes to build (dependencies + library itself). However I agree that the whole process of knowing what to do might be more tedious than with other libraries. We just can't provide precompiled dependencies for X different compilers on Y different systems with Z different dependencies. We constantly try to improve this - but especially working on the docs is not something we feel motivated to do, especially with donations being very rare (maybe you can donate a bit once you are rich ) and people barely get helping with it (we gladly accept doxygen docu changes).

We also are working on improving CEED.

Regarding the ill-informed comments - could you detail where you saw them? It would be helpful to inform people there of the pros and cons of CEGUI to clear that up.

Also I recently changed the way CEGUI handles the optional libraries, we now defined a set of libraries that are activate in the dependencies and the cegui cmake so that only the crucial parts are built by default.

Finally, I have to say that your project looks very cool - and congratulations on being greenlit!. I wish you good luck with it.

[SandDragon]

Cool, it seems you may have already simplified the initial setup and configuration process. Also, I wasn't unhappy about the time it took to build and get started with CEGUI. It took longer than the other alternatives that didn't actually work for me... having something that works well is always worth the time! Sorry, I don't know where the ill-informed comments are anymore but I'll let you know if I see them again in the future.

I totally understand how keeping up with the documentation and developing at the same time can be challenging, especially for a small team. Hopefully I can help with that once my game is out, as a way to say thank you.

[Ident]

Great to hear that. Feel free to contribute via pull requests on bitbucket or via patches.