General SDL usage questions

The company that I work for is in the process of building a new gaming
platform. (We’re in the video poker business) The chosen platform is Linux,
and I am in charge of developing new games for this platform. We are going
to need to put out a new game about every 2 months, 2 months programming
time anyway. I am looking for something on the presentation side of things
and SDL seems to have allot going for it. But I have a couple of questions
that I hope some of the SDL experts can answer for me.

1.) What sort of authoring tool do the graphic artists usually use for SDL
based games? We currently have our graphic guys demo the animations that we
need to implement. Then we hand code the thing using a home grown animation
engine, flipping bitmaps, and trial and error timing control, i.e. change
timings until it looks close to the mockup. As you can imagine, this is very
time consuming. So I would like to get a package from graphics that included
audio timing within the frames, to just run, as is. So, back to my original
question, does SDL support an authoring tool and engine that we can use to
accomplish this?

2.) I need to have a program that controls the guts of the game. Can I have
an SDL based application driving the graphics, that will display animations
and bitmaps based on what the game program tells it to do? I guess what I am
asking is can I have an SDL based application communicate with another
program?

I’m sure that I’ll have more questions later on…

Thanks,
bll

2.) I need to have a program that controls the guts of the game. Can I have
an SDL based application driving the graphics, that will display animations
and bitmaps based on what the game program tells it to do? I guess what I am
asking is can I have an SDL based application communicate with another
program?

That’s not really a function of SDL so much as it’s a function of the
underlying operating system. There are several ways for two programs to
communicate under Linux. SDL just handles the multimedia aspects.

As for graphics tools, I’ll have to leave that to someone else to answer…

–ryan.

At 01:36 PM 11/8/2001 -0700, you wrote:

I’m in a very similar situation … I also work for a company that
manufactures gambling equipment. I have been using the SDL for that for
about 3 months. I have ported their flagship product from a proprietary
hardware system to the SDL. The approach that I found best was to use the
primary thread to do all of the drawing and start up worker threads to
handle game logic. I used SDL_mutexes to protect my data from thread clash.
It works very well. You will need to build your own animation engine to sit
on top of the SDL.

For my artwork I use .BMP files ( any graphic editor can handle them )>The company that I work for is in the process of building a new gaming

platform. (We’re in the video poker business) The chosen platform is Linux,
and I am in charge of developing new games for this platform. We are going
to need to put out a new game about every 2 months, 2 months programming
time anyway. I am looking for something on the presentation side of things
and SDL seems to have allot going for it. But I have a couple of questions
that I hope some of the SDL experts can answer for me.

1.) What sort of authoring tool do the graphic artists usually use for SDL
based games? We currently have our graphic guys demo the animations that we
need to implement. Then we hand code the thing using a home grown animation
engine, flipping bitmaps, and trial and error timing control, i.e. change
timings until it looks close to the mockup. As you can imagine, this is very
time consuming. So I would like to get a package from graphics that included
audio timing within the frames, to just run, as is. So, back to my original
question, does SDL support an authoring tool and engine that we can use to
accomplish this?

2.) I need to have a program that controls the guts of the game. Can I have
an SDL based application driving the graphics, that will display animations
and bitmaps based on what the game program tells it to do? I guess what I am
asking is can I have an SDL based application communicate with another
program?

I’m sure that I’ll have more questions later on…

Thanks,
bll


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http://www.libsdl.org/mailman/listinfo/sdl

> 1.) What sort of authoring tool do the graphic artists usually use for SDL > based games?

I use The Gimp under Linux to do my graphics design. (Note: I’m not a very
good artist, nor do I put much design thought behind many of my games…
I obviously like to program more than design :wink: )

I typically use BMPs and then a colorkey transparency… or, more
often, I use PNGs (which requires SDL_image library; but it’s well worth it!)
which have true alpha channel capability.

Since you probably know the kind of hardware you’re writing for, you have
the advantage of being able to target to it. If these machines are going
to be something like a Pentium/133Mhz and you want 640x480 or better at
a good framerate, you’ll probably want to avoid too much (or any)
alpha blending and stick to prerendered graphics and the on/off colorkey
style masking.

> So I would like to get a package from graphics that included > audio timing within the frames, to just run, as is.

Depending on how much simultaneous animation and sound you’re going to
have going, it might be suitable to use MPEG videos and the SMPEG library.

You can tell the MPEG thread to blit into an off-screen surface, and then
do a blit copy from that onto your actual on-screen surface. Nifty.

(I did this when I started working on a sliding puzzle game which used
videos instead of still photos)

So, back to my original
question, does SDL support an authoring tool and engine that we can use to
accomplish this?

It really shouldn’t be too hard to roll your own. It will add to your
development time in the beginning, but if you do it right, should be
a fairly turnkey solution for most of your future projects needs’.

2.) I need to have a program that controls the guts of the game. Can I have
an SDL based application driving the graphics, that will display animations
and bitmaps based on what the game program tells it to do? I guess what I am
asking is can I have an SDL based application communicate with another
program?

You might be able to code your main application to use SDL_Net library
(which I’m unfortunately still not at all familiar with, so excuse any
bad assumptions :slight_smile: ) and then have the SDL program which drives the
graphics and sound use SDL_Net, too, to listen to commands.

-bill!On Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 01:36:08PM -0700, Lang, Brent wrote: