Wanted to throw something out there ... as in does anyone else want this?
I've been looking at finishing the M.C.Escher tesselation-like game I was working on a year ago but want to do it for Windows/Steam as well as for iPads because the iPad-only game market just seems bad to me. I have thus been looking at 2D game frameworks for C++ that support at least Windows and iOS. There is surprisingly little that is free:
- Cocos2d-x: I used this the last time I wrote a game but it has gotten soooo bloated and soooo poorly documented and just soooo gross
- a new one, Oxygine, which looks good but is just by literally one guy and is super-duper immature -- I posted a question in its forums asking for pros/cons of Oxygine vs. cocos2d-x and it took three days to get a superficial response, etc.
- Torque2D: I never used it. Someone at work said "he didn't recommend it" and it does seem super heavyweight and geared toward a workflow in which you make a platformer using a GUI level editor. My games tend to have weird constraints and don't conform to genres like "platformer" or whatever so I am philosopically opposed.
- Marmalade: looks great but is a commercial product if you want to support Windows desktop and has to be ad ware otherwise. Not willing to pay $500 for an indie license for a game that will probably make approximately 0 dollars.
Now I am not including SDL, Allegro or SFML in the above because I don't consider them frameworks; I consider them hardware abstraction layers. I might have missed one but there doesn't seem to be something really lightweight and simple that doesn't do much but what it does it does right.
I've been thinking of rolling my own which would do the following:
- expose a hardware abstrction layer for user input, sound/music, and graphics.
- implement a simple sprite hierarchy and expose a stage/scene graph, basically a tree of sprite base class things that get drawn every iteration of the game loop.
- expose loading of sprites from sprite sheets w/ batched sprite rendering.
- manage memory via std::shared_ptr<T> et. al. rather than some adhoc leaky looking crap that no one understands like Cocos2d-x.
- possibly expose an (optional) actions/transitions mechanism via C++ std::function<T>'s / lambdas.
And that is it. Basically slightly higher-level than the level of SDL/Allegro/SFML but lighter than Cocos2d-x and lower level than Torque et. al.
I don't want to write the hardware abstraction layer myself though -- I know nothing about sound SDKs and am not an OpenGl master. If I do my ultra lightweight "engine" I am looking at doing it on top of SFML which has experimental ports to iOS. I'd just use SDL 2.0 for hardware abstraction but no subpixel accuracy when placing sprites is a deal breaker for me e.g. my escher game requires placing sprites at floating point locations and letting the graphics card do its thing to look good, tried it with integers coordinates and it was a mess.
Anyway, does anyone want this besides me? Curious because if there is interest I could try to set it up like an actual cross-platform framework.
