I already wrote (and posted screenshots) about the skinned controls in the GUI of my current project. And this time you can even see it in motion, as I attached a small video I captured of that control which you can see here (it’s a flash movie, about 500 KBytes big). Due to the fact that swf is not the best format for videos it doesn’t look as good as in “reality”, but you should see that I also added a fade-in and fade-out to the controls, so that the buttons slowly fade in and seem to kind of glow out when you leave their mouse area.
Other than that I also cleaned up the old code, fixed out the memoryleaks that were in from the “early” days when I wrote this protoype and threw out all 3DS-models (and loading) and replaced it with my own .x-loader (see an older post here as to see why I prefer .x over .3ds). So now all code is up to my current coding standards and it shouldn’t be too far before I have something playable. And in addition to that I also made the UI even more independant of the application that’s using it, as you can now load everything from and XML-file, so in your app you just do something like MainGUI.AddWindowFromXML(’testwindow.xm’) and all information about the window and the controls that are placed inside the window are loaded by the GUI and the window can direclty be used within the application (one thing, if needed, you still must do in the code, is to set callbacks if you want to do some additional stuff when that window is drawn).