Announcing SDL 0.8

SDL Development
1

Note: If you don’t want to hear future announcements, or received this
message twice, please let me know.============================================================================
ANNOUNCING…

                      Simple DirectMedia Layer

                             Version 0.8

                    "Simple, efficient, and portable" 

This library is designed to make it easy to write games that run

on Linux, Win32 and BeOS using the various native high-performance media
interfaces, (for video, audio, etc) and presenting a single source-code
level API to your application. This is a fairly low level API, but using
this, completely portable applications can be written with a great deal of
flexibility.

SDL has been split into a stable release, 0.8.x, and a development release,
0.9.x. The stable version is very robust, having been extensively tested over
the past 3 months. The development version has some exciting features in
progress, such as automatically adjusting to display changes, CD-ROM support,
and more.

Get it now from:
http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/SDL/

GIMP lovers, grab your brushes!
The “Official SDL Logo Contest” is now in session.
Send your entries, or instructions on downloading your entries, via e-mail
to slouken at devolution.com The winner will get his or her logo on the SDL
web site, and will get their names in the CREDITS list for the next version
of SDL! :slight_smile:
You can view the contest entries at:
http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/SDL/contest/

And if you’re wondering… “what can I really do with SDL?”, be sure
and download the examples archive, which contains demontrations of:

   Simple sprite animation 
   Flame effects
   Organic firework animation 
   Playing .FLC and .FLI animations
   Playing WAV and Macintosh sound resources 
   Playing .MOD, .S3M, and .XI modules
   Plasma effects and palette animation
   Cut and paste of text and images
   Starfield rotation 
   Truetype font rendering with FreeType 1.1 
   Dynamic image warping 
   Emulating the Prometheus TrueColor API

If you are interested, join the development mailing list by sending e-mail
to:
sdl-subscribe at surfnetcity.com.au

Enjoy,
-Sam Lantinga

2
  • At which point is the transparency at this version ?
  • Can I mix HW and SW Sdl surfaces in the same application?

Stephane Magnenat
Stephane.magnenat at urbanet.ch

3
  • At which point is the transparency at this version ?

Don’t bother using hardware transparency. It’s supported, but you don’t
have a way of knowing ahead of time whether or not to create the display
surface in hardware.
SDL 0.9.6 which should be released in a day or three will have much
better support for getting information about the hardware.

Software transparency, especially with the SDL_RLEACCEL flag, is fine.

  • Can I mix HW and SW Sdl surfaces in the same application?

Yes.

See ya!
-Sam Lantinga (slouken at devolution.com)–
Author of Simple DirectMedia Layer -
http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/SDL/

4

Yes, I implemented a “blue screen” effect with that missile control game last
night, and it worked quite nicely. (The SDL_RLEACCEL makes for a HUGE
performance gain!)

The only thing I couldn’t figure out is how to hard-code the transparent pixel
into the code.

I ‘borrowed’ the technique you used with the aliens demo, but using the first
pixel on the sprite’s surface is IMHO an ugly hack ;-(On Wed, Oct 14, 1998 at 12:12:32PM -0700, Sam Lantinga wrote:

Software transparency, especially with the SDL_RLEACCEL flag, is fine.

–
– Michael Samuel

5

Le Thu, 15 Oct 1998, vous avez ?crit :

Software transparency, especially with the SDL_RLEACCEL flag, is fine.

What is exactly this flag ? Is it documented in SDL 0.8.8 ?>On Wed, Oct 14, 1998 at 12:12:32PM -0700, Sam Lantinga wrote:

Yes, I implemented a “blue screen” effect with that missile control game last
night, and it worked quite nicely. (The SDL_RLEACCEL makes for a HUGE
performance gain!)

The only thing I couldn’t figure out is how to hard-code the transparent pixel
into the code.

I ‘borrowed’ the technique you used with the aliens demo, but using the first
pixel on the sprite’s surface is IMHO an ugly hack ;-(

–
– Michael Samuel
–
Stephane Magnenat
Stephane.magnenat at urbanet.ch