On Tuesday 06 April 2004 20:16, Norman Vine wrote: > Out of curiosity what can't you do today that would make FlightGear > better because we are using GLUT that you would do differently today > if we were using SDL and what exactly is it that would make FGFS better. >
Using SDL has many positive effects. 1. It is widely accepted, easy to use and even commerical companys do use it for their commercial games. This means also that there is a large user base that can jump in and improve flightgear. 2. (my favourite one) A very nice input and event handling system. It uses a virtual keysym to each key on the keyboard which map to some level to the operating systems's keyboard scancodes. So it is very easy to nicely support non US keyboard layouts plattform independet. You can also use the same input infrastructure to support joystick, mouse and other input devices the same easy way. 3. It can be easily used together with OpenAL as our default sound API and SDL sound as a backup system in the case OpenAL is not supported on other plattforms. IMHO OpenAL is a must, because it is crossplattform capable and allowes us to easily implement 3d sound in flightgear, doppler shift effects, attenuation and hardware sound accerlation (if the soundcard supports it). It is also very easy to use because it is rather similar to the way OpenGL works and is used. 4. SDL has its own "portable" threading API which is plattform independent. That feature could be very usefull. And much more. I think GLUT is dead, we should realize that and SDL seems to be the best solution today to replace GLUT. Best Regards, Oliver C. _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
