Kore - a modern alternative to SDL

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-1 comments, last by RobDangerous 10 years, 11 months ago

We released a first version of a small C++-library and I'd like to get a little feedback about it. It provides roughly the same features as SDL but it directly abstracts the 3D graphics APIs instead of providing a 2D API on top of it. We think it's a great starting point for any engine development (we use it ourselves in our higher level toolkits like the Kha SDK) or for people who want to stay close to the metal when they implement their games. Even for all those mobile sdks, which currently just use OpenGL - which is still a problem on Windows. It is tiny and runs on all popular platforms. We also have console versions internally, and while we can of course not release those to the public, using console proven technology is still advantageous.

It contains it's own small build system, which creates project files for Visual Studio and XCode and a GLSL compiler based on ANGLE, which can output specific GLSL versions and of course HLSL for Direct3D9 or Direct3D11. Minimizing friction for our customers is a big focus and we try to make it as compatible as we can. That means of course full Direct3D support in addition to OpenGL support and it runs without any additional DLLs - not even D3DX (we use a custom binary shader format for D3D to avoid using the D3DX compiler tools).

It's still early and a little rough around the edges, we kind of just ripped it out of it's usual surroundings. There is also no documentation yet (but it's really tiny, reading the headers is almost sufficient). But please have a look at it and tell us what you think about it. We have an enourmous website for it at http://kore.ktxsoftware.com and the zlib licensed source code for the lib, the shader compiler and the build tool is located at https://github.com/KTXSoftware

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