Firstly, I must sincerely apologise for going more than a month without an update, though is is a technical blog and not a personal one so I will not bore you with details. Suffice to say my workload has expanded massively, certain things in my personal life have had to be reprioritised, and this has left me with precious little time for myself and my hobbyist pursuits.

Still, in the times I have not been in a vegetative state from exhaustion, I have been working on my little project. A game developer friend of mine suggested I might want to check out CEGUI,which is actually a component of the previously-mentioned Ogre engine. It is a rather high-level windowing system for either OpenGL or Direct3D. It’s nicely object-oriented and contains good bindings for SDL too. It allows some major theme skinning as well as window\widget design though XML files which introduces great flexibility, but also allows you to fall back on hard-coded windows if you don’t want to be messing around with resources.

It seems to be that CEGUI could well be the answer to my problems, but I have yet to actually be able to use it in any of my code. While they are fantastic in providing assistance through the forums, and provide the binary SDKs for every version of MS Visual C++ from 6.0 onwards, Mac OS X, and Linux build environments, there is no package for GCC under Windows. This means I have to get the source version, and all the dependencies (16 packages in all), and then build them each 4 times over (both debug and release each for static and shared builds). As you may expect, this takes a not inconsiderable amount of time, which is coincidentally, the one thing I have least of right now.

Right now then, working on my ‘project’ consists of mainly: once a week, downloading a package and building one (or two if I’m really lucky) of the bits I need, and marking it off the list. Though after having spoken to Crazy Eddie (Lead\Original developer of CEGUI), at least I can be safe in the fact that once I’ve got through all of this, the fruits of my labour will be hosted along side the other binary SDKs for the availability of other users. Who knows, maybe I can even get my name in a source file somwhere…

Until then, back to my build tree.