The original alpha edge problem noted in this thread still exists in my test today on a Mac and Linux.
I see this as a fundamental mistake in the way alpha blending is handled.
To me, the various comments about a hack to ‘set the color of transparent edge pixels’, should be disregarded as an absurd workaround.
How, exactly are we supposed to scale a game to fullscreen without nonsense hacks? Doesn’t this mistake in SDL break basic use cases across the board where core quality is concerned?
If a person doesn’t use SDL, and is writing code more directly with the gpu in a modern approach, then compositing one alpha image on top of another and scaling it to fullscreen with a textured quad, is a trivial matter and could be considered a very typical situation that I do all the time.
Why then, is this fundamental component implemented incorrectly, and will anything actually be done about it in this community? Does this community take core problems like this seriously?
I also noticed in another somewhat relevant thread, how Mason appeared to be fighting warped cultural ideologies, and unable to convince the people with rational dialog:
https://discourse.libsdl.org/t/sdl2-sdl-rendersetlogicalsize-disable-letterboxing/19859
The threads read to me this:
It is not that the culture is merely stupid, unthinking, or limited in attentional effort or time, but instead it sounds like the ideologies are so warped and specific, that basic wrong notions are elaborated with enormous detail and clarity, so that the excuses for why things are wrong today, become fortified and indisputable. Thus, irrational things continue to exist. Now, someone please tell me, how such situations can ever be overcome? Certainly this type of mental phenomena plagues the developer culture at large and not just SDL.
Surely, even my post may be as fruitless as Mason’s attempt at shining light on the absurdities going on in the culture, but how can we move on from this era, unless these incorrect mindsets and misplaced ideologies are confronted head on as irrational and done away with? As long as the cultural mindsets continue like this, how can we expect developer communities to ever meet and sustain higher standards of quality and re-establish strong foundations? Even if a new fork were established, if people from this same cultural tribe of mindsets became dominant participants, then it would merely end up back in the same current mess.
Perhaps, very few people even understand what the real foundational issues are here, how they came about, and why the cultural trends sustain that type of result, but if anything, I would like to see people speak out more like Mason, and if they have no other choice, to gather in a separate community that holds higher standards for essential elementary things, compared to what appears to be the majority population of today.
Every time, I try to keep an open mind and sample a public library like this, I run into these same type of problems, and can only make these type of wide spanning degrading conclusions about the culture, and resort to going back to doing everything myself at the lowest level possible.
If we are ever to work together collectively and achieve the fundamental standards of quality of this kind, I can only imagine that the current majority group would either have to change their beliefs to Mason’s, or be prevented from participating in our minority culture. Because, as it is right now, when both cultures try to exist in the same space, the warped majority culture is overriding the minority of higher standards and destroying it completely.
If anyone thinks this set of conclusions is wrong, then please tell me how to perform this basic scaling in SDL without nonsense hacks, and I will sincerely apologize for not reading and testing thoroughly enough.