Announcing SDL 0.8b

SDL Development
1

Available from the usual place:
http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/SDL/develop.html

What’s new:
* Initial port to IRIX 6.x
* Initial port to OSF/1 3.2 (no sound yet)
* Cleaned up dynamic linking and added static linking
* MacOS port in progress

The biggest thing that changed is the way dynamic linking is handled.
Now, the SDL library functions don’t have the same name as the stub
function pointers – this means that some systems (FreeBSD) that got
segmentation faults when dynamically loading SDL should now work.

You can also build SDL as a static library under UNIX by going to
the obj/x11 subdirectory after running the configuration make and
typing “make static”. This creates libSDL.a with which you can link
normally. If you do this however, you’ll need to also link in the
appropriate X11 libraries and so forth. Example makefile flags for
this are given in the Makefile in the test directory.
If you didn’t understand that, no worries – it doesn’t affect you.

New in the demos is an FLI/FLC player, written by Jasper Berlijn YAY :slight_smile:

The discerning will also notice a new demo directory “netlib” … Shh…
(don’t look yet)

Oh, one of the latest changes is the SDL applications now check the
version of the dynamic library they load and warn you if the version
doesn’t match the one they were compiled with.
This will probably become some sort of configurable option.

Immediate plans:
Work on DirectX enhancements for SDL
Work on MacOS port
Add NAS sound support for DEC OSF/1
Add page flipping w/VBL support
Fix software cursor crash (ack!)

Those aren’t in any particular order, but the software cursor bug has
high priority at the moment.
This is enough to keep me busy for a while. :slight_smile:

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

2

Hi Sam,

Not posting this to the list, since the MacOS port is in early days, but I
have looked briefly at the code, and I have a few suggestions.

First of all, calling WaitNextEvent even with a wait time of zero is a big
performance hit for Mac games. You can’t do it. Use GetOSEvent during a
game loop and WaitNextEvent otherwise. Alternatively of course you can use
InputSprocket.

For screen resolutions, using DrawSprocket will be trivial. I will rewrite
this at the weekend if you like. That way you can resize the screen
automatically. Otherwise, if you want to use 800 x 600 but the user has the
screen set to 640 x 480 you won’t be able to do anything about it, even if
the user has a multiple scan monitor capable of higher resolutions.

I don’t use CVS, and can’t really be bothered to learn how (sorry) but I am
happy to work with you directly on this one.

The other area I can help in is the startup dialog (2 minutes work) and
other mac-specific stuff. It seems like you have a very good handle on what
is needed.

I notice in SDL_AllocHWSurface you essentially get a handle to the window’s
gworld. You don’t actually create a gworld. Is this what you want ?

As far as I can tell, on the Mac version an SDL_Surface is a gworld pixmap,
using the private data. Is this right ?

Mark--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Mark Elliott Tel. (+44)(0)1222 874686
Department of Chemistry Fax. (+44)(0)1222 874030
University of Wales, Cardiff
PO Box 912
Cardiff CF1 3TB
UK email <@Mark_Elliott>