SDL 2.0 book or tutorial list in just C ? |
unfy
Guest
|
'lo!
Is there a book or set of tutorials out there for using SDL 2.0 in C ? NOT C++, just C. I have some coworkers that are interested in learning SDL and all of our projects are written in C. Most of the books and tutorials I've found seem to all want to write their examples in C++, which is doesn't help my coworker. Even a SDL 1.x in C would be fine. Our focus is primarily in 2D, not 3D if it matters. -Will _______________________________________________ SDL mailing list http://lists.libsdl.org/listinfo.cgi/sdl-libsdl.org |
|||||||||||
|
Alex
|
Hello, unfy!
I'm C programmer too and I learning SDL2 now. I learn it myself without any tutorials, using just SDL-wiki and this forum. And sometime looking to SDL2 source code (it's written in C). I making simple test programs for different aspects of SDL2 and learn how it works. I think we need more SDL tutorials in C - it is good idea. But for now we can learn using this resources, which we have. We can learn SDL2 + C programming together if you interested |
|||||||||||
|
SDL 2.0 book or tutorial list in just C ? |
SDL 2.0 book or tutorial list in just C ? |
unfy
Guest
|
'lo!
Many of the C++ tutorials and book examples do heavily use classes and stuff. It's not useful for my coworker who hasn't touched C++ in 20 years. I would normally agree with your assertion, Jonny - but not this time heh. I might go with Alex's wiki thing... it's how I learned SDL a decade ago. Will just have to print out all of the pages (coworker prefers print media). Now - why am I the one doing the printing ? Good question best left for another day. -Will On 11/7/2014 9:43 AM, Jonathan Dearborn wrote:
|
|||||||||||||||
|
SDL 2.0 book or tutorial list in just C ? |
unfy
Guest
|
Along these lines of using the wiki, is there an easy way to print the entirety of the wiki ? A script or something ? Have multiple platforms available to use as a platform for fetching it.
Looking through the moinmoin documentation - nothing strikes me as a way of doing so... -Will On 11/7/2014 5:29 PM, unfy wrote:
|
|||||||||||||
|
SDL 2.0 book or tutorial list in just C ? |
Joseph Carter
|
Many people who don't speak C++ find it somewhat unapproachable even though the syntax isn't all that different from C once you get past streams, templates, namespaces, operators, and multiple inheritances. As you note, games rarely use those features. To a C developer, it isn't that hard to adapt the differences. Unless of course you're not very experienced with C OR C++, which describes a large user base of tutorial books on game development.
If you think C++ syntax looks weird to C people, try Objective-C. Joseph Sent via mobile
SDL mailing list http://lists.libsdl.org/listinfo.cgi/sdl-libsdl.org |
|||||||||||||
|
SDL 2.0 book or tutorial list in just C ? |
Eric Wing
Guest
|
On 11/7/14, Alex wrote:
Since I just posted for help about a Windows render-to-texture bug with an example, the cat is starting to get out of the bag, so I might as well post So I agree, I would like to see more pure C tutorials too, so I've written a couple of examples. The best one is a Flappy Bird clone. It is not meant to be trivial though. It is intended as a thoughtful and meticulous look at Flappy Bird and try to appreciate the author's design decisions and capture the spirit/feel of the game which includes all the details and odd-ball behaviors that out-of-the box/pre-canned game engine tutorials are normally terrible about focusing on (often because they don't give you that kind of fine control over things). It uses SDL 2.0's 2D renderer. But it also uses SDL_ttf (the fancy outline text is dynamically created, not pre-made pngs), SDL_image, ALmixer for audio, OpenAL for pitch effects (press the Shift keys while playing for slow-motion/speedup), and Chipmunk for Physics. Anyway, I haven't launched my new SDK yet (but soon), and I still haven't written the formal tutorial that goes with it, but you can find the source code to FlappyBlurrrC here: https://bitbucket.org/ewing/flappyblurrrc And prebuilt binaries here: Mac http://playcontrol.net/tempdownload/BlurrrBinaries/FlappyBlurrrCMac.zip Linux (64-bit, SteamOS runtime compliant) http://playcontrol.net/tempdownload/BlurrrBinaries/FlappyBlurrrC-0.1.1-Linux.tar.gz Windows (Windows 7+ 64-bit) zip: http://playcontrol.net/tempdownload/BlurrrBinaries/FlappyBlurrrCWindows.zip installer: http://playcontrol.net/tempdownload/BlurrrBinaries/FlappyBlurrrC-1.0.0-win64.exe Android (4.0+, 4.1+ for best audio performance) http://playcontrol.net/tempdownload/BlurrrBinaries/FlappyBlurrrC-debug-unaligned.apk Thanks, Eric -- Beginning iPhone Games Development http://playcontrol.net/iphonegamebook/ _______________________________________________ SDL mailing list http://lists.libsdl.org/listinfo.cgi/sdl-libsdl.org |
|||||||||||||
|
SDL 2.0 book or tutorial list in just C ? |
unfy
Guest
|
On 11/7/2014 8:27 AM, Alex wrote:
looking to SDL2 source code (it's written in C). I making simple test programs for different aspects of SDL2 and learn how it works.
+ C programming together if you interested Smile -------------- HI Alex! Sorry about missing this message ._. The purist C tutorials would be more or less for my co-worker, not me. I'm sure they'd help for others as well - a set of pure C tutorials lets the end user then decide how to do class structure later if they so desire to go that route. This way, a particular style isn't forced upon them. When it comes time for me to pick up SDL 2.x (soon it seems), I'd do like I did the first time I learned SDL 10-15 years or more ago - just use the Wiki / function documentation -- which sounds like how you're doing it. It is by far the best way to learn IMHO, but some people want full on tutorials / books. -unfy _______________________________________________ SDL mailing list http://lists.libsdl.org/listinfo.cgi/sdl-libsdl.org |
|||||||||||||||
|
SDL 2.0 book or tutorial list in just C ? |
unfy
Guest
|
On 11/20/2014 6:50 PM, Eric Wing wrote:
Hi Eric! I'll give these a once over and see how they look and if they are co-worker friendly. Look forward to playing the game and seeing these design decisions you talk of too heh Thanks! -unfy _______________________________________________ SDL mailing list http://lists.libsdl.org/listinfo.cgi/sdl-libsdl.org |
|||||||||||||||
|
SDL 2.0 book or tutorial list in just C ? |
Joseph Carter
|
The problem with the wiki documentation is that its structure is too
much a parameter reference and too little a conceptual explanation of the best practice for doing something. SDL has a lot of parts, and a lot of ways to use those parts, and the wiki docs will more or less explain what they all are. Just that some of them aren't things you should be doing anymore and exist mostly for historical and backward compatibility sakes. I mentioned in another post recently the event interface, for example. It's totally an optional subsystem, and so most things have alternative ways of doing them. Yet none could rationally argue that disabling the event system and working around it is EVER a good idea anymore. Most of SDL's targets (ALL of the main-line ones) send events whose proper handling is mandatory. Consequently some subsystems have multiple ways of using them, with one being the clear preference for new development. I must have written explanations and sample code for the joystick and game controller event models half a dozen times a year ago. If there was a convenient conceptual model page on the website, I might not have needed to do it more than once—on the wiki. But as it stands there isn't even a functional place to put that kind of thing just now. A _when_ to use the renderer might be appropriate documentation, and I have no idea where you'd put a tutorial for those whose games are outgrowing the SDL renderer and need to move to OpenGL/Direct3D. Of course if I had my way for 2.1, the renderer would grow to the point that you don't NEED to "outgrow" it, but it's impossible to guarantee that a user couldn't screw that up for fixed pipeline OpenGL. I'd still like to do it anyway and just stick the warning label on it for anyone using that kind of legacy stuff. Anyway, that'd still be something that doesn't fit anywhere into the wiki structure even if it's the kind of thing that really should be immediately available to SDL developers. For sound, I could see something on basic channel mixing and audio painting being written for SDL. It'd have to link elsewhere for a full tutorial on these things, and to wiki pages for extension libraries, OpenAL, whatever… But fully documenting SDL's sound subsystem does require some small element of a tutorial because people honestly might not really even know what they're looking at. Kind of why you see SDL_mixer being dragged in for what should be trivial audio tasks. I've yet to see a comprehensive explanation I fully understood about handling full unicode text input and display. Font substitution, input methods, etc… I tend not to even bother partly because my uses of SDL never really involve significant text for the end-user, and because aside from maybe iOS, I just haven't got a clue where to start on figuring it out. That'd make a good conceptual page. :) As you can see from these examples, there's a lot of documentation that could/should be in the wiki, but with the current structure isn't really. And there's a fair bit that probably should be there as well that I've got no good suggestion how to even implement. And that's still the documentation just for people who kind of know something about what they're doing but just don't understand the kind of stuff SDL gets used for. You still need more hands on, step by step sorts of guides for those who need more hand-holding than would be appropriate for conceptual and basic overviews and best practices docs. That'd be a good job for additional tutorials and books. Joseph On Sat, Nov 22, 2014 at 01:09:09AM -0600, unfy wrote:
SDL mailing list http://lists.libsdl.org/listinfo.cgi/sdl-libsdl.org |
|||||||||||||||||
|
SDL 2.0 book or tutorial list in just C ? |
j_post
Guest
|
On Saturday 22 November 2014 07:33:29 T. Joseph Carter wrote:
1) wiki docs: A technical reference for those who are already familiar with SDL, and have experience using SDL, but occasionally need to look up details of API functions (a parameter reference). 2) wiki users guide: A reference for those familiar with C and/or C++ that gives simple examples of how to use the features of SDL (for experienced programmers new to SDL). 3) wiki tutorial: A beginners guide with extensive examples, including, when appropriate, complete code for simple programs (Yikes, an entire book!). Disclaimer: My experience with wiki is pretty much limited to being a more or less regular user of wikipedia. I have not yet contributed anything to any wiki, and don't know if the above is even feasible. It does seem to me that creating such a three-part wiki would be a massive effort (but probably worth it). Jeff _______________________________________________ SDL mailing list http://lists.libsdl.org/listinfo.cgi/sdl-libsdl.org |
|||||||||||||
|
SDL 2.0 book or tutorial list in just C ? |
Jared Maddox
Guest
|
Maybe the wiki needs a "by Usage" page to go along with the "by Name" and "by Category" pages, where "usage" refers to subsystems specifically? _______________________________________________ SDL mailing list http://lists.libsdl.org/listinfo.cgi/sdl-libsdl.org |
|||||||||||||||
|
SDL 2.0 book or tutorial list in just C ? |
Joseph Carter
|
If you're writing #3… That's always the problem with that kind
of thing. Those who can basically write a book usually tend to, well, write a book. Personally, I don't think it's the SDL wiki's job to teach someone how to use an IDE or write basic C. And I've never thought SDL should be mixed with a language primer. I could see a very high-level thing written using maybe PySDL to teach concepts of programming using game development—great for the kids, and indeed one of my currently back of the back burner hobby interests. But it's easier to understand and correct conceptual errors in a language like Python where the syntax doesn't get in the way. Joseph On Sat, Nov 22, 2014 at 09:59:42AM -0800, j_post wrote:
SDL mailing list http://lists.libsdl.org/listinfo.cgi/sdl-libsdl.org |
|||||||||||||||
|
bjadams
|
I am new to SDL so I tried to look for books that cover v2
The only book I found is "SDL Game Development" I came across a few other books dated <2003 but they seem to cover v1 Are there any books out there? Thanks |
|||||||||||
|