On 2/12/06, Brandon J. Van Every <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Peter Keller wrote: > On Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 12:23:32AM -0700, Shawn Rutledge wrote: >[...SDL...OpenGL...Game development...]
Now, I'm not a game developer (and the last game I wrote was a really bad Donkey Kong clone written in TI Extended Basic, which was ultimately rejected by a computer magazine, which nearly killed my computing career... ;-) but I do work in a situation (embedded application development). where I have to do with the problem of getting nice snazzy graphics and GUI elements onto constrained devices. I really *love* SDL as it handles all the ugly stuff like getting a window on the screen (even if in fullscreen mode) and letting me handle events is a simple and sane manner. It is boring drudgery to get these things to work and it solves portability problems pretty well. Especially the tight focus on the gaming "infrastructure" (if one can call it that) like event-handling and window-management makes it so good: it doesn't try to take over my graphics pipeline, and it doesn't throw stuff at me that I don't need (and what I need I can get via SDL_ttf, SDL_image, and so on). It's portability is excellent and the API is so simple that I seldom use the SDL egg: easyffi and a few `define-foreign-record's is more than enough to get going, if one doesn't mind using a procedural C-like API inside ones Scheme code. I don't know enough about licensing issues: LGPL *may* be a problem for some people. I also think that portability is still important. Brandon seems to have the opinion "Only Windows pays off - so I don't bother with the rest", to which he has every right. On the other hand the Mac is an interesting platform, since there is practically very little competition, and I still use Linux a lot and somehow still believe in open source... :-) And don't forget the commercial aspect of Linux: I have heard of at least one case where our company was approached by a customer who does game systems (like the one you'll find in gaming arcades) on a Linux basis. Why shouldn't the gaming console of tomorrow use Linux and standard APIs and tools? cheers, felix _______________________________________________ Chicken-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users
