Hi I'm working on a 2d game engine and have been dealing with the input part for quite awhile now. First I used GLFW, then SDL, and now I'm back on GLFW thinking of using SDL again... I like GLFW because it's small and licence-free. But it has awful callbacks, and from what I've heard, doesn't work too well on Mac. SDL on the other hand has a very nice Event-system but is bloated for my needs (just need window and input), must be loaded dynamically (I'd like as few files as possible) and has a licence I'm not too comfortable with. Anyone have any suggestions what I should do?. Are there any alternatives or should I go with SDL anyway?, how will it's licence affect me? I actually implemented a fully functional Event system by modifying GLFW, but I couldn't get it to run properly (not my code, GLFW couldn't load "Gdi32.dll"). I'm getting really tired of all this and would like to concentrate on my actual engine design instead of petty platform-stuff. Any help is appreciated, thanx /Mekanikles

Quote:Original post by Omid Ghavami
2. "has a license I'm not too comfortable with": What are you planning to do which would violate a LGPL license?

To explain further... An LGPL license doesn't require that you open source a project that uses SDL. You can keep it as closed source as you want.

SDL may be a little bloated for your needs but since it's statically linked (i think it is anyway) it's not going to bloat your resultant code. Therefore, IIRC, only those features which are used will be linked into your executable.

Just go with SDL. It's so nice and easy to use.

-me

Hm ok, I was under the impression that code linked to LGPL needs to be open as well, but maybe I'm misstaken (did read into it now, and it seems to be a question whether or not the code is 'derived' from the LGPL code or not).

However, I'm quite certain that SDL must be linked dynamically (think the licence requires it) and I don't like the dlls, they are large and many (if I wanted to load .tga I needed quite a few large dlls). It feels silly when the dlls are larger than the actual game :-)

I'm leaning towards SDL, but if it can be linked statically I will certainly use it.

thanx for the replies /Mekanikles

Quote:Original post by Mekanikles
However, I'm quite certain that SDL must be linked dynamically (think the licence requires it)

Yeah. May be. I've never actually used SDL. =) I just know it's always the goto library for 2D graphics on this board.

-me