IMPORTANT!
=========
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.

INTRODUCTON TO 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 INFORMATION AND DOWNLOADS
==================================
For more general information about Guichan and/or downloads related to Guichan
please visit the Guichan homepage at http://guichan.sourceforge.net.

GETTING HELP WITH GUICHAN
=========================
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.


GETTING INVOLVED WITH GUICHAN DEVELOPMENT
=========================================
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.
