Hacker News Reader

Comment by girvo | Hacker News Reader

I think the main feature is being able to easily leverage shaders with a nicer API. Having done a fair bit of SDL over the years, dropping down to pure OpenGL and shaders can be a bit... low-level, which is to be expected. This seems to make that quite a bit nicer?

Edit: For example, check out this http://dinomage.com/reference/SDL_gpu/group__ShaderInterface...

View on HN

Is it possible to render textured quads of arbitrary shapes? I'm trying to make a runtime for Spine (http://esotericsoftware.com/spine-runtimes) and SDL's inability to do that directly without using OpenGL was the reason I couldn't use it. I don't see a way to do that in Sdl-gpu either - maybe I need to look at the source code.

If you want to render Spine 3.x models, you'll need to be able to render arbitrary textured triangles so meshes and skewing work correctly. Check out the new Spine TypeScript runtime (spine-ts), which renders via WebGL. Should be trivial to port to OpenGL (ES).

Oh awesome. Thanks Mario!

GPU_TriangleBatch() lets you submit an array of triangle vertex data. That way you can integrate with Spine, librocket, and everything else like that.

Worth noting that the Allegro library also has a shader API:

http://liballeg.org/a5docs/trunk/shader.html

I agree. I think the main purpose is a "2D Accelerated Rendering" replacement that allows for shaders and other custom techniques.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com