A Gentle Introduction into SDL 1.3 | Hacker News Reader

A Gentle Introduction into SDL 1.3

immersedcode.org

27 pointskeyist6 comments

The main point here seems to be that you can make separate windows with SDL 1.3 and attach OpenGL contexts to them, versus SDL 1.2's approach of single-window-single-OpenGL-context.

As far as OpenGL tutorials go, I recommend "An intro to modern OpenGL" articles by Joe Groff [1]. It covers the things in OpenGL 2 that still exist in OpenGL ES 2.

[1]: http://duriansoftware.com/joe/An-intro-to-modern-OpenGL.-Tab...

There are a couple of problems I ran into in the tutorial (or in my ability to follow the tutorial as a complete SDL/OGL newbie):

* GL_COLOR_BIT should be GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT. This may be a change which occurred between the version the author used and the version I pulled today.

* Doesn't really mention which OGL libraries are needed. Maybe cmake takes care of this. Since I used crusty ol' gmake, here's what my compiler invocation looked like:

gcc -std=c99 -Wall -L libs/sdl-1.3/local/lib -l SDL -l SDLmain -l GL -I libs/sdl-1.3/local/include/SDL -I include -o sdlapp src/main.c

It took quite a bit of Googling to get that -l GL line.

Still, provided a couple of hours' entertainment this afternoon. Thanks!

SDL 1.3 is like the Duke Nukem Forever of portable game-friendly libraries, I think.

Note: I mean this in a very friendly way, I have masses of respect for Sam Lantinga and all the other people behind SDL. It just seems they've been working on 1.3 for soo long.

In contrary to DNF, though, SDL 1.3 has been usable for ages.

But indeed their versioning is a bit strange. There are not many projects which stay at one major/minor version for so long.

> It just seems they've been working on 1.3 for soo long.

Sam Lantinga recently left blizzard and converted SDL into a commercial project. That shows his commitment to the library, so it's barely a duke nukem forever. Also SDL 1.3 is perfectly useable.

Yup, I remember learning a bit about SDL ca. 2002/3 and they were already at version 1.x. I think it was 1.1 at the time, then moved to the all-new 1.2. Funnily enough, it seems to be usable enough that a myriad of projects are still using them (and to think I was betting my bottom dollar Allegro would become the library of choice to game devs!)

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