Glut, SDL, or just plain old win32/xWin
At this point im using glut, but I''m reading alot of posts and such that suggest it only for demos, so Do you think SDL is good enough for a game engine or should I keep it at the win32 xWindows lvl?
I personally think that if you''re working on a serious project, you should use SDL. Let me tell you a story.
In july, I got together with a couple other students to work on a first person shooter (somewhat a parody of Counter strike ). One of us was die-hard Linux, and refused to write anything that wouldn''t run under Linux. I, on the other hand, hadn''t had the opportunity to work with Linux before that. It was quite necessary that it ran on Windows. We chose GLUT to deal with windowing and stuff. We found GLUT to be decent in most respects, until it came to managing things other than graphics. We absolutely needed cross-platform asynchronous input, something GLUT didn''t provide. We also needed cross-platform sound (I think this was just before OpenAL came out, I might be wrong). In any case, GLUT just wasn''t letting us go any farther. After switching our core to SDL, we found that everything became streamlined. We had the capabilities we needed, and SDL actually gve us much finer control over what we were doing. We could control our own main loop, do more dynamic things, etc.
Both are very nice libraries. We just found that SDL is much more suited to larger, more serious projects, especially cross-platform ones.
In july, I got together with a couple other students to work on a first person shooter (somewhat a parody of Counter strike ). One of us was die-hard Linux, and refused to write anything that wouldn''t run under Linux. I, on the other hand, hadn''t had the opportunity to work with Linux before that. It was quite necessary that it ran on Windows. We chose GLUT to deal with windowing and stuff. We found GLUT to be decent in most respects, until it came to managing things other than graphics. We absolutely needed cross-platform asynchronous input, something GLUT didn''t provide. We also needed cross-platform sound (I think this was just before OpenAL came out, I might be wrong). In any case, GLUT just wasn''t letting us go any farther. After switching our core to SDL, we found that everything became streamlined. We had the capabilities we needed, and SDL actually gve us much finer control over what we were doing. We could control our own main loop, do more dynamic things, etc.
Both are very nice libraries. We just found that SDL is much more suited to larger, more serious projects, especially cross-platform ones.
This actually helps me out too because I was just starting to learn SDL and was thinking if I could incoporate it with OpenGL. Cool
yeah, SDL works great with OGL...when you create the window you just use SDL_OPENGL as a parameter like this:
SDL_SetVideoMode(screen_x, screen_y, 0, SDL_OPENGL)
SDL_SetVideoMode(screen_x, screen_y, 0, SDL_OPENGL)
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