Since I'm usually too lazy and uninspired to make complete games, I thought I might have a go at throwing together a tiny library for high-speed 2D rendering using OpenGL and SDL. It would be solely concerned with initialising video, loading sprites, drawing them, buffer flipping, and graceful shutdown. The emphasis will be on making usage as simple as normal SDL, portable, and requiring no or little OpenGL specific knowledge. Assuming this is a reasonable project - and I'm guessing it might be, considering how many people still ask about this despite relevant snippets being posted in the past - what features would you like to see in it?

Regarding pixel manipulation, I wouldn't want to go too deeply into this since it's usually slow no matter what system you use, but some sort of SetPixel(r,g,b,a as floats from 0.0...1.0) might be on the cards.

Not sure about locking surfaces before writes - I believe it may only be DirectX that requires this on SDL so it might not be an issue, but I'd have to look more closely at it under OpenGL.

Colour keying - definitely going in. I had just planned on converting the keyed colour in the sprite to having 0.0 opacity at the start. Is there any common use case requiring an alternative approach, or can I safely use that in all cases?

Rotation, certainly. About an arbitrary point... I don't see why not as that would just involve a translation before the rotation.

Scaling is already done, since I saw a snippet for that here once before.

Render to buffer, I will have to research. Any links appreciated.

C implementation... I was considering a C implementation with some thin wrapper classes for C++ fans. I'll be writing a Python wrapper for it if all goes well, so the simpler the better.

SDL rendering fallback if no hardware was available would be nice but it's a little beyond the scope of what I want to do, since the idea here is to provide a lib that makes it practical to use full alpha-blending, scaling, rotation, bilinear filtering, and so on in your simple 2D apps.

Font library... I would like to implement very simple text support using sdl_ttf as the backbone. So basically, if you want font support, you'd need that library installed, but it would be used behind the scenes. Similarly for sdl_image - if you have it installed then the system can load more file formats but its use is largely transparent.

Alpha blending - yeah. I already have support for an opacity value from 0.0 (transparent) to 1.0 (opaque) with all values in between. I also want to include a utility function that blends 2 sprites together from one side to the other, or one corner to the other, to make tile transitions simple.

Not sure about dynamic resizing and resolution changes. I'll see how difficult it is once other things are implemented.

Owl, what do you mean by tiles and layers? I think everyone might have different thoughts when they say that, so I'd like to know what you would need.

So far, I have the following implemented:
- Window opening in fullscreen or windowed mode at chosen resolution
- Sprite loading using SDL_LoadBMP or IMG_Load (from sdl_image), for power-of-two sized sprites
- Basic sprite rendering
- Scaled sprite rendering
- Rotated sprite rendering (currently around centre of sprite only)
- Translucent sprite rendering (from fully opaque to fully translucent)
- Alpha channel sprite rendering (from PNG)
- Coloured quad rendering with arbitrary opacity (useful if you need to darken or lighten part of the screen, for instance)

Next up I hope to handle the colour keying aspect, which will edit the alpha channel based on the specified key. Once that's done, I'll clean up the code and give out a test release for people.