Peter Keller wrote:
These things are trivial. OpenGL has platform-specific functions to handle this sort of stuff, i.e. the WGL functions on Windows.On Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 12:23:32AM -0700, Shawn Rutledge wrote: These are more involved. The proper comparison, however, is SDL vs. any other cross-platform GUI. Games benefit from their own in-game GUIs. Various OpenGL-based GUIs exist; I have no idea how worthy they are for game development. It's such a bog trying to compile all these stacks of stuff on Windows, that I've never really gotten that far. I'm really not sold that the effort is worth it vs. just cooking something up yourself. Especially since foreign libraries tend to pull away from Scheme development.and deal with keyboard, mouse, window manager events, etc. Well, yeah. No shocker. But I don't see why I should prefer SDL over my own code. Especially since, I don't care about cross-platform support as a primary goal. I need to ship games on Windows. The Mac game market is marginal, and the Linux game market is worthless. The real porting money is in consoles and I don't think SDL has anything to say about that. My thought is, I'll build what I want. If it turns out to be compelling, and worth bothering to make open source, and others want to make it work on other platforms, great they can. Not really my problem as far as getting the ball rolling. 3D engines tend to have critical mass on one particular platform anyways. They have to survive an awfully long time and please a lot of people for multiple platforms to be supported equally well. Honestly I'm not sure there's any open source 3D engine that is really at that level. Seems like, the story is usually, it works on Platform X and someone else is dinking on a broken crufty barely working version for Platform Y.That's why you need something like GLUT (which isn't a part of opengl, but often bundled with it) or SDL. GLUT has it's own internal event handler loop which you cannot control, and SDL exposes this loop so in essence you write it. After coding plenty of 3D things in my life, I've found I very much prefer SDL to GLUT any day. Yeah, dunno. But it's out there, it's not going away, it'll get improved. Really it's either OpenAL or Ogg Vorbis.Plus, SDL has an audio and mixer set to its API which are really nice. There is OpenAL, which is the opengl equivalent for an audio library, but it had some issues for a while politically (Loki Games wrote it, went out of business, released it, it lied fallow for a while, then some people took it over), I'm not sure on its completness and support at this time. Yeah it might be less of a big deal to do it this way nowadays. Texture maps used to be a lot smaller.You'll probably have to use freetype or something to deal with the truetype font. I've never used truetype stuff in anything I've done, usually I just have some big bitmap of a bunch of antialiased characters and then I select the subtexture which represents one letter out whenever I need it. The pipeline takes care of bilenear filtering it and mapping it onto whatever surface it needs to go on. Agreed. The main problem with using OpenGL for 2D is just that it's a PITA to get started with, before you've actually cooked up your 2D abstraction layer. Sort of a baroque underlying machine for simple 2D tasks. It's irritating that the industry never came up with standard abstractions for 2D stuff. Instead everyone has to be good little engineers and re-implement 2D abstractions over and over and over again. Unless you actually like SDL and the LGPL. Cheers, Brandon Van Every |
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