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