   Designing an interface with guichan
  I looking for some ideas about how to design the interface for the rpg project in this part of the forum. It was easy enough to do just using the win32 console but trying to do a graphical user interface seems a bit harder.. I'm using guichan along with SDL to do this so have the following widgets available: Button, CheckBox, Container, DropDown, Icon, LabelListBox, RadioButton, ScrollArea, Slider, TextBox, TextField, WindowWith the win32 console you could just create a menu and then clear the screen and bring a new menu for each option, but with a gui how do you achieve something similar, I'm thinking you need to create 4 or 5 different forms with all the buttons, labels etc but any other suggestions?   
  My suggestion would be to implement a state machine and have each state have it's own 'gcn::Container' that gets set to the top whenever the state switches. Each container should store a different menu, and it should be as easy as just pushing/popping them into place. Doing it this way also allows you to limit input and drawing access to only whatever menu you choose to be on screen at any given time.There's some good example code of how to implement a state machine HERE.Hope this helps,-Wynter Woods   ;  Sorry I never saw your post but I'm going to give this a try, doesn't seem easy to implement a state machine. I'm not sure I understand the singleton pattern either.Heres what I have so far:StateManager.h#pragma once#include <vector> #include <guichan.hpp>#include <guichan/SDL.hpp>#include "SDL.h"#include "GameState.h"class StateManager{public:StateManager(void);virtual ~StateManager(void);static void pushState(GameState* state);static GameState* popState();void logic(SDL_Event event);    void render();private: static std::vector<GameState *> states; gcn::SDLInput *input;gcn::SDLGraphics *graphics;gcn::SDLImageLoader *imageLoader;gcn::Gui *gui;static gcn::Container *top;gcn::ImageFont *font;};StateManager.cpp#include "StateManager.h"std::vector<GameState*> StateManager::states;gcn::Container *StateManager::top;StateManager::StateManager(void){imageLoader = new gcn::SDLImageLoader();gcn::Image::setImageLoader(imageLoader);graphics = new gcn::SDLGraphics();graphics->setTarget(SDL_GetVideoSurface());input = new gcn::SDLInput();font = new gcn::ImageFont("fixedfont_big.bmp", " abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789");gcn::Widget::setGlobalFont(font); gui = new gcn::Gui();gui->setGraphics(graphics);gui->setInput(input);top = new gcn::Container();    top->setDimension(gcn::Rectangle(0, 0, 640, 480));gui->setTop(top);}StateManager::~StateManager(void){}void StateManager::pushState(GameState *state){states.push_back(state);top->add(state);}GameState* StateManager::popState(){top->remove(states[states.size() - 1]);return states[states.size() - 1];}void StateManager::logic(SDL_Event event){input->pushInput(event);}void StateManager::render(){gui->logic();gui->draw();}Main point to note is that I needed to use to static functions for push and pop and that top is also static which means it is exposed and not private. Not sure if that is a good idea however I have managed to create a little test project which works so far. Would appreciate feedback from others.   