How to best show OSS licenses inside game?

SDL Development
1

To respect the license requirements of different OSS packages, I’d like to ask about how to best present licenses to users of mobile apps specifically.

In software for desktop or traditional iOS/Android apps without SDL2, this is more or less simple: either include the licenses in an ‘About’ menu, or include them in files with the package. We’ve also seen people add them to their website to make them easily accessible, although they should also be included with the package.

We’ve found problems listing technical information on the iOS and Android pages on the store (iTunes, Google Play), so it’s best that licensing info is listed elsewhere.

Ideally, we’d like to make it available in the game itself. However, in SDL2, this presents the challenge of rendering and letting users navigate large amounts of text in a way that adapts to the screen size well and can be rendered efficiently.

Has anyone else gone through this challenge and was was your solution?

Alex

Backend Software Developer
Keera Studios

2

I’ve not done so for the purposes of meeting licence requirements, but for displaying a reasonable amount of pre-formatted text I’ve found that supporting the ‘usual’ touchscreen gestures (pinch to zoom, drag to scroll in any direction, flick to scroll with inertia, touch to stop scrolling) is satisfactory.

1 Like
3

So, the thing is that the license is big. Really big. I’m concerned that the surface might be too big and cause issues on phones with less memory or resources.

I tried using a multi-line function that wraps the text when it’s bigger than a certain amount, but the problem there was that it was flickering (changing colors). I tried what I could think of, but I’m not an SDL2 expert, I’ve only just started, so I may be missing a lot.

Alex