SDL 1.3 status ? |
SDL 1.3 status ? |
Beoran
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Wilbefast: that's exactly what I'm getting at. The strength of SDL is the wide array of backends it supports. If you want a game lib that only supports popular HW accelerated backends, then SFML (OpenGL only, IIRC) or Allegro 5 (OpenGL + DirectX, IIRC) will do just fine. No sense in occupying the same market space as those libraries. As for your reasons to like SFML better, 1) Is amply covered since there are at least 3 c++ free wrappers of SDL, not to mention wrappers in Python, Ruby, Haskell , Scheme, lisp, ... and whatever other language really. That's why it's nice SDL is written in plain c, it's easy to wrap for other languages. 2. Is being solved now, and 3 and 4 are some things we should work on.
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SDL 1.3 status ? |
Beoran
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Forest, sure, IF (big IF that) HW acelleration works well, it's faster, of course. As for software renderers being CPU hogs, that's true but not a problem, since games simply are CPU hogs, to be better of service to our customers. However it's not a matter of "misconfigured drivers" only. On linux there's the "not very good drivers" phenomenon. On windows there's the "users who don't know how to install drivers" phenomenon. And sometimes the hardware simply sucks. As I said before, I have a hardware accellerated card under linux (in a desktop box that cost me only 230 euro when I bough it) where the HW accel is slower than sw blitting, simply because the graphics card itself sucks that much (it's one for nettops, I think). Not to mention the Intel graphics chip on my nettop which has similar problems. (It seems Intels loves it that you use the CPU more than the gfx chip.) I think some people here just don't understand how underpowered some graphics hardware can be. It's not because your lastest high end gfx card is so fast, that all other people have a similar one. There are much more people with badly accelerated or unacellerated devices than you might imagine. Plenty of old and/or underpowered and/or tiny devices and computers out there. SDL is ideal for those to, since it's so widely portable.
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SDL 1.3 status ? |
Beoran
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Alberto, you seriously mention Mesa 3D? It's as slow as molasses, certainly for 2D rendering. The SDL software renderer beats the socks off it, often SDL is 50%-100% faster. So Mesa 3D is simply a non-option. In some cases it's so slow that it might even be faster to emulate software 3d with SDL's software renderer than to use Mesa. Just look at TinySDGL.
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