I was wornding which one was better for graphics and game programming (like graphics, sound, input, etc..)?

not having used Allegro, i can only vote for SDL. I also found out that you can use SDL as a base for windowing and event handling if you move on to OpenGL. so... yeah, SDL.

SDL does have th advantage of directly supporting OpenGL if you later decide to get into 3D programming as you can use SDL for windowing/input and OGL for graphics so my vote goes to SDL.

Allegro also provides support for openGL via the add-on lib allegroGL.

I have used both in the past and IMO they both have there advantages. Allegro is slightly easier to pick up, has a friendly community (www.allegro.cc) and provides support for some things (such as datafiles and 3d software routines) that SDL doesn''t.

SDL on the other hand offers less in the core lib (and is consequently smaller, this is a good thing). There are plently of add-on libs for functionality that you may be missing. I haven''t had any experiance of the SDL forums so I can''t comment of them.

In the end its hourses for courses.

I think i will directly into OpenGL, becuase I have had a little experiance with it before, nothing big, just making a 3d cube, and like 3d triangle. But then I move backwards and when back to the basic a C++ becuase I real skipped them just to get into 3d.

I''d have to say, if you intend to use hardware rendering using OpenGL, you really want to use SDL.

SDL and Allegro do slightly different things.

SDL -> Provides basic support for setting up drawing surfaces etc, in a platform independent and fairly sane way. Also provides input, and various other things (like task-switching handling for windows etc)

Allegro -> Mostly provides quite a rich library for *Software* rendering. If you intend to use software rendering, Allegro is pretty good. Its routines aren''t the fastest, but they are very easy to use (and modern hardware is pretty fast, even for software rendering). Allegro also provides input handling, some (software) 3d routines, a simple GUI (Aimed at games *not* general purpose apps), and a few other things.

Allegro is a "Bigger" library, and from my experience, generally buggier. But it does a lot more and is easy to use, especially for game programming newbies.

SDL has a bunch of associated libraries like SDL_image (loads PNG, Jpeg into SDL surfaces including getting them into OpenGL textures pretty easily).

Allegro has some add-on libraries, including AllegGL, which combines openGL and Allegro, but my experience shows it''s patchy, and potentially suffers from performance problems (Not if you only use it for openGL, if you mix Allegro software rendering functions too).

AllegGL shows quite a lot of promise, as you can do potentially advanced / clever stuff (Allegro software rendering into openGL textures, then render those using opengl hardware on to the accumulation buffer, potentially in 3d, which should be quite cool)

Mark

If anyone has any 2D Allegro vs SDL vs Anything Else benchmarks, i''d be interested. I''d like to up my 2D framerate if possible and am just curious which lib has faster straight-up image blitting.

well, i just want to bring to back up cuase i am still looking.

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