Goodbye Shaped Windows

SDL Development
1

I just wanted to say goodbye to shaped windows in SDL3.

  • You didn’t make much sense for games, especially in the console/phone market
  • You were hard to get working right some times and crashed seemingly at random at others.
  • You were quirky, absurd, and kind of campy,
    but you were fun.

Maybe some day you will be back, but for today I am ready to let go.

Thank you.

2

I’ve implemented shaped windows in native Win32 apps, and the “nonrectangular window shape” facility in X Windows looks similar in spirit. Have you considered building a debug version of SDL3 and debugging it yourself? I had to do quite a bit of that, back when I was porting my employer’s apps to SDL2/Linux, and found the SDL developers to be receptive to bug fixes.

3

SDL_SetWindowShape() is back in SDL3, FYI.

1 Like
4

I actually did dive back to this old post to try to delete it so that there wouldn’t be this confusion, but the post was already too old and permission to modify/delete had been removed. But shaped windows were not gone for long.

At least we can all say that shaped window is back in a slightly new form. In my opinion this version is more stable than what we had in SDL2, see the second reply here where I wrote some minimal code to draw a shaped window using a PNG image. (It’s already slightly outdated as the SDL3 source has continued to evolve).

1 Like