Questions

SDL Development
1

Is there a list of features to be implemented published somewhere? It
would be good to know what the bounds of SDL should be-we don’t want this
to get bloat, nor to be so feature poor as to be useless…

Has the clone issue been resolved? Do we have to make yet another
non-portable asm block which reimplements a std syscall:
#include <linux/sched.h>
#include <linux/unistd.h>

   pid_t clone(void *sp, unsigned long flags)

The Man page also says:
This call is Linux-specific and should not be used in
programs intended to be portable.
however, the level at which the clone stuff is done is purely linux
specific anyway, so I’m not sure this is an issue?
(I can’t remember what the argument for this was, was it due to the lack
of glib6 installations out there?-perhaps that would be incentive to
upgrade :slight_smile:

Is there a manifesto-y thing describing the aims of SDL?

Are MacOS and DOS considered yet for the porting-I know of an old friend
who is a MacOS games programmer, and is considering porting to linux-if we
could say “write your game on MacOS using libSDL and it will basically be
portable to every other platform you can think of” he would start work
today.

Perhaps some kind of endian-ness file loader would be of use (anyone)?

Just some thoughts to help kick this list off…

njh
p.s. Sam, is there any timings on SDL’s buffering(vs SVGA e.g.)?

2

Is there a list of features to be implemented published somewhere? It
would be good to know what the bounds of SDL should be-we don’t want this
to get bloat, nor to be so feature poor as to be useless…

The current feature list is fairly open. I’m trying to keep it simple,
but I want feedback to see what would be really useful for games developers
out there. :slight_smile:

Has the clone issue been resolved?

I don’t have glibc yet, so not yet.
What I should really do is detect whether glibc is available, and if so,
use that clone() library call.

Is there a manifesto-y thing describing the aims of SDL?

Not an official one, though enough people have asked me what the
aims are that I could probably rattle one off. :slight_smile:

Are MacOS and DOS considered yet for the porting-I know of an old friend
who is a MacOS games programmer, and is considering porting to linux-if we
could say “write your game on MacOS using libSDL and it will basically be
portable to every other platform you can think of” he would start work
today.

DOS is probably not doable, due to the architecture of SDL – threads anyone? :slight_smile:

MacOS on the other hand, is one of the platforms I would like to support,
but don’t because of lack of systems to develop on. Metrowerks is more
expensive than GCC. :slight_smile:

However, anyone want to take it on? It’s been ported enough that the
system-dependent parts are pretty discrete.

Perhaps some kind of endian-ness file loader would be of use (anyone)?

There are some endian-aware functions (check out SDL_endian.h) in SDL
already, but I don’t plan to add full file-loading functions to the library.
Bloat… :slight_smile:

Just some thoughts to help kick this list off…

Anyone want to add any thoughts?

p.s. Sam, is there any timings on SDL’s buffering(vs SVGA e.g.)?

SDL’s buffering is so dependent on the underlying system that comparisons
are almost pointless. Under X11, SDL is as fast as the MIT shared memory
extension will allow it to go. How fast is DirectX compared to SVGA?
That’s how fast SDL is on Win32. :slight_smile:

It also makes a big difference what kind of color-matching you use,
and whether you ask for hardware surfaces when setting the display
mode. Heheh, just a teaser of the next beta release folks. :slight_smile:

I’ll announce it in a few days. Right now I’m having fun with the logo!

See ya,
-Sam Lantinga (slouken at devolution.com)–
Author of Linux Maelstrom -
http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/Maelstrom/

3

So you can port Maelstrom to all Linuxes
but not to BeOS using your library?

Best Regards,
David Sowsy

(PS I’m working on my own space game as a course project
for my graphics course though I’m using OpenGL w/hardware
acceleration and BeOS specific stuff. )

// Frameworks epitomize software engineering. Code for a reason.
// “Brain ready for infrared upgrade.” -Me
// http://www.cs.uml.edu/~dsowsy

4

FYI, I read in usenet that GGI is being ported to a variety of
platforms. I haven’t bothered to track down specifics, but you might
want to.

–Cliff
@Clifford_T_Matthews

5

So you can port Maelstrom to all Linuxes
but not to BeOS using your library?

SDL uses the clone() system call on Linux to get multi-threading.
This isn’t currently available on PPC linux, to the best of my
knowledge, or rather, nobody I know has code to do it. :slight_smile:

So, aside from that fact, Maelstrom could be ported to all Linuxes,
and BeOS using my library. One of the main reasons it hasn’t been
done yet is Ambrosia Software retains the rights to Maelstrom and
has expressly forbidden a port of Maelstrom to either BeOS or Win32.
(I think they want to do it themselves. :slight_smile:

(PS I’m working on my own space game as a course project
for my graphics course though I’m using OpenGL w/hardware
acceleration and BeOS specific stuff. )

I’d really like to see integration of Mesa with SDL, allowing 3D
applications to use the SDL library. I’m not really sure how that
would work, since I’m not really familiar with OpenGL yet.

Any takers? :slight_smile:

See ya!
-Sam Lantinga (slouken at devolution.com)–
Author of Linux Maelstrom -
http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/Maelstrom/

6

FYI, I read in usenet that GGI is being ported to a variety of
platforms. I haven’t bothered to track down specifics, but you might
want to.

It’s being ported to X11 on SGI and Solaris, as well as Win32.

In some ways SDL parallels GGI, but is less ambitious (so far),
and runs now on multiple platforms.

Eventually I’d like to see Joystick input, 3D sound capability,
OpenGL, CD-ROM API, etc, etc.

The main idea was: Cross-platform, and KISS :slight_smile:

SDL will run on top of GGI as a support low-level driver.

See ya!
-Sam Lantinga (slouken at devolution.com)–
Author of Linux Maelstrom -
http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/Maelstrom/

7

I’d really like to see integration of Mesa with SDL, allowing 3D
applications to use the SDL library. I’m not really sure how that
would work, since I’m not really familiar with OpenGL yet.

Any takers? :slight_smile:
I’m working on a game project in OpenGL w/BeOS as my course
project for graphics. I wouldn’t be able to devote enough time
to it but i might be of some help.> See ya!
-Sam Lantinga (slouken at devolution.com)

–
Author of Linux Maelstrom -
http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/Maelstrom/

8

I hacked a work-around last night using fork instead of clone.
I was able to run the test programs with this, but only if I linked them
statically. If I linked it dynamically, all I got very SIGSEGVs very early
in the initialization (I haven’t been able to pinpoint the exacting
location).

Unfortunately, fork() won’t work in most of what SDL uses threads for.

You need that shared address space… :frowning:

I’m well aware of this, but we should get the thing to link dynamically
first, before we take care of the other problems… Actually I think using
pthreads will work, as long as we are careful about when and what we call.

yours,
phil.On Tue, 31 Mar 1998, Sam Lantinga wrote: