SDL 2.0 has been released!

Wednesday, August 14, 2013 - 00:26

Simple DirectMedia Layer has been a mainstay of open source game development for years, its a cross-platform open source library for handling input, output and graphics.

The new features in 2.0 include:

Full 3D hardware acceleration
Support for OpenGL 3.0+ in various profiles (core, compatibility, debug, robust, etc)
Support for OpenGL ES
Support for multiple windows
Support for multiple displays
Support for multiple audio devices
Android and iOS support
Simple 2D rendering API that can use Direct3D, OpenGL, OpenGL ES, or software rendering behind the scenes
Force Feedback available on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux
XInput and XAudio2 support for Windows
Atomic operations
Power management (exposes battery life remaining, etc)
Shaped windows
32-bit audio (int and float)
Simplified Game Controller API (the Joystick API is still here, too!)
Touch support (multitouch, gestures, etc)
Better fullscreen support
Better keyboard support (scancodes vs keycodes, etc).
Message boxes
Clipboard support
Basic Drag'n'Drop support
Proper unicode input and IME support
A really powerful assert macro
Lots of old annoyances from 1.2 are gone
Many other things!

Download is here:
http://www.libsdl.org/download-2.0.php

Mailing list announcement is here:
http://lists.libsdl.org/pipermail/sdl-libsdl.org/2013-August/089854.html

So OGA, what are your thoughts?

p0ss

joined 13 years 7 months ago

Wednesday, August 14, 2013 - 00:49

I'll start with my own limited take on it.

Basically its going to mean a lot of open source games will be much easier to port to mobile devices and can start using more advanced graphics, input and sound. Also, since SDL is used by Valve, we can probably expect to see a lot more Steam Linux games using these features. Finally, my multiple monitors might get used under Linux!

The biggest downside I can see is that the bindings will all have to be updated. Specifically 2.0 doesn't yet bindings for Java, Lisp, Lua, Perl, PHP or Ruby like there are for 1.2. This will probably change with time, but for the moment it might keep some projects from upgrading.

http://www.libsdl.org/languages.php

sauer2

joined 11 years 3 weeks ago

Saturday, August 17, 2013 - 09:28

@p0ss: Yeah, but about the bindings...

Let's not pretend that most of them were in a usable state.

Half of them where written by people who thought like "Oh, I'm writing the next LISP/ML/Prolog/Whatever dialekt, but OH NOSE, no one will use it if there is no possibility to display stuff, so let's add an incomplete SDL binding, bam done."

Even worse, some language creators/maintainers (like the Pike guys) disabled parts of the API to force users to use their own crud. NEVER do that.

Then, the Java folks usually use more highlevel wrappers, the perl binding was/is a PITA to install and to distribute and PHP bindings seem pointless.

Also, raw bindings to extension languages like Lua make no sense.

It may sound rude, but nothing was lost, I'd say.

Syrsly

joined 11 years 10 months ago

Monday, September 16, 2013 - 20:24

I have not dug into SDL yet, but I really want to. I never used the SDL bindings, either. PyGame looked well-put-together, but I could be wrong.

I have seen some nice Lua-driven SDL-powered games.

Syrsly
Twitch Streamer, Web/Game Developer, & Artist

syrsly.com - contact me for commissions, thanks!