After some discussion on the “Again Rotozoom” thread, I figure I may as well
formally raise this proposal:
Because all platforms that SDL supports have hardware-accelerated video
available as a standard feature, and because this has been true for over a
decade, (7+ Moore cycles,) and because of the difficulty of implementing several
advanced features in a performant manner in software, I propose that SDL 1.3
should drop support for non-accelerated backends such as GDI and X11 and focus
on modern, hardware-accelerated APIs such as OpenGl, GLES and Direct3D.
Seb Da Rocha brought up an interesting point: the SDL software renderer is
generic and implemented entirely within SDL instead of relying on an API backend
to crunch the pixels. As such, it could be retained as a reference
implementation (“this is what correct rendering is supposed to look like”) for
people implementing SDL on new platforms, but it should be made clear that it’s
only for use as a reference implementation and not supposed to be used to
actually build games with.
Can everyone agree on this?
Mason