Looking into designing a 2D based physics based game for the Windows Surface tablets. Would want my game to look and feel like Angry Birds or Cut the Rope, in terms of nice crisp moving graphics, but my concept is totally different is SFML the best way to go or would you recommend something else?

Some Questions about SFML:

1. Have you used SFML, would you please provide your honest feedback on using it?
2. What if I spend a ton of time using it, then they don't support it anymore am I basically screwed? I guess I'm basically concerned about the future of it.
3. I don't see how they make revenue from SFML as it appears free? What's keeping it from collapsing or not being maintained
4. Will games programmed in SFML work with on Windows RT?
5. SFML vs. GDI+? Seems like GDI+ is harder, but I already know GDI well, and seems like GDI+ has a solid future, would it make more sense for me to stick with GDI+?
6. Not SFML question but I’ll ask here anyways, I know Poser already, what other program(s) are generally used to make nice smooth looking graphics like in Angry Birds or Cut the Rope or is this really just the artist being great and using any program?
7. Does SFML support touch screen? Can it be encorporated?

Thanks,

Vanz

My experience with SFML only really covers your first two questions.

Two months ago I started using SFML for my RPG hobby project and I've been finding it pretty straight forward to use. Tutorials and documentation have covered everything that I've needed so far.

I choose SFML just a couple months ago when I realized that DirectX 7 just wasn't cutting it anymore (it was very much out of date when I started using it 10 years ago). Mostly, it was that I wasn't getting any benefit out of hardware acceleration. After some experimentation I found that it was pretty trivial to get a few thousand more blts out of my draw routine using SFML. I also tried experimenting a bit with SDL but for some reason I wasn't getting the same responsiveness from my test machine as my dev machine (in fairness, the dev machine did see some nice acceleration I think). Seeing good results with SFML I got lazy choose not to try and figure out what was needed to get it working right and moved on. I also took a stab at updating from DX7 to DX9 but I was having enough trouble setting up the SDK that I again got lazy choose to just move on with using SFML. After all, I wanted to get back to working on game logic not spending a ton of time rewriting display code.

I believe going from the library that was horrendously outdated when I first starting using it to the modern one was relatively painless because:
1. It was easy to tell from the documentation what I was going to need to do.
2. My existing code happened to be such that making the changes to the display code had no impact on the game logic.

It could also be that I haven't been doing anything in the way of special effects. I don't know what the impact of switching libraries would be if I had been. Still, I have to imagine that keeping your display code and game logic as separate from each other as possible would minimize the impact if you do need to consider changing libraries for some reason.

While it may not support multi-finger gestures, it should support single finger touch since that translates to mouse clicks and drags. Hover won't work, however.