Coming back to SDL

Hi All

I used to use SDL for many years in various projects. Since then, we moved to SFML which is an excellent API (yes I know there is some disagreement over SFML here, but I don’t care, it is good). Due to the requirements of a project, we have to use DirectX and that means coming back to SDL.

So, I guess the question is; is SDL 2.0 actually stable, what improvements over SDL 1.3 does it have? I cannot find any useful documentation anywhere, so maybe someone can give me some help. Basically, I ported our game engine to SDL 1.3 but it lacks the scaling and rotation functionality that SFML does so well. Does SDL 2.0 have such things?

Many Thanks
Ed

SDL 2.0 has rotation and scaling now, if you mean the renderer
functions. Look up SDL_RenderCopyEx.

You mention needing to use DirectX specifically though, so I’d have
expected that you’d use DirectX directly to draw. Is there any
specific reason for requiring DirectX? SDL’s renderer API is generic
(though yes, Direct3D is one of the backends).

2013/3/28, ebyard <e_byard at yahoo.co.uk>:> Hi All

I used to use SDL for many years in various projects. Since then, we moved
to SFML which is an excellent API (yes I know there is some disagreement
over SFML here, but I don’t care, it is good). Due to the requirements of a
project, we have to use DirectX and that means coming back to SDL.

So, I guess the question is; is SDL 2.0 actually stable, what improvements
over SDL 1.3 does it have? I cannot find any useful documentation anywhere,
so maybe someone can give me some help. Basically, I ported our game engine
to SDL 1.3 but it lacks the scaling and rotation functionality that SFML
does so well. Does SDL 2.0 have such things?

Many Thanks
Ed

Thanks for your reply.

We need to use a DirectX/3D backend because our customer (we make casino type games) has a DirectX hook to let them display system messages over the game. Currently they do not support OpenGL correctly and it will take them many months to fix this.

So our only hope is to use DirectX, which I assume SDL still defaults to on a Windows platform.

I’ll look at the new functions. I guess there is no proper documentation yet? I found the wiki…but it’s not much help :frowning:

Thanks
Ed

Fair enough.

SDL defaults to Direct3D on Windows I think, but you probably want to
use SDL_SetHintWithPriority before creating the window to ensure it
uses that backend.

Also you can generate a Doxygen documentation from the header files
(go to the include directory and run doxygen from there), but yeah,
documentation is sorta flaky for the moment.

2013/3/28, ebyard <e_byard at yahoo.co.uk>:> Thanks for your reply.

We need to use a DirectX/3D backend because our customer (we make casino
type games) has a DirectX hook to let them display system messages over the
game. Currently they do not support OpenGL correctly and it will take them
many months to fix this.

So our only hope is to use DirectX, which I assume SDL still defaults to on
a Windows platform.

I’ll look at the new functions. I guess there is no proper documentation
yet? I found the wiki…but it’s not much help :frowning:

Thanks
Ed