Short answer: It’s not going to happen.
Long answer: Most modern things written using SDL use OpenGL. A few
use Direct3D. There is no native OpenGL GUI, but there are a couple
of GUIs that can back-end into OpenGL like fltk. They’re pretty
heavy for what they are, though, and so you see much more often
people rolling their own. Who needs to worry about the traditional
2D aspects of rendering windows when the 3D system will handle the
details for you as a side effect of how it works?
For the few that use Direct3D, you’ve already got some access to
native Windows widgets?and you just can’t get much better than native
system controls in function. Getting them to look like you want them
to ? is an exercise for the reader.
2D games typically could benefit, but if they need extensive GUI
support, they are just as easily written in their native widget set
with an allocated pixel buffer as would be trying to shoehorn
something as large as fltk into the mix. And anything much smaller
can be stripped down more. At that point you’re back to the roll
your own approach.
Another part of the problem is that there used to be such GUIs for
SDL. They were for the software renderer, but they tended not to be
ported to the 2.0 Render API. Those most interested in such a thing
were counting on the promise of that API made in 1.3: It would always
be there, whether your game was 2D or 3D, and you’d always have
access to use it.
That promise never materialized, and support for fixed pipeline
OpenGL (required for OpenGL 1.x support, as well as for GLES 1.x) has
a lot to do with the reason why. Basically it’s not practically
possible to push the entire GL state on to a stack once a frame, do
stuff, and then put it all back the way it was. Without that, you’d
have to clearly set in stone what SDL expects when the renderer is
given control, and those expectations would have to be firmly
maintained. Possible, but hard. A few people have tinkered with it,
but nothing done that way could be released into a production
environment.
But doing that is a prerequisite for a GUI that can be used anywhere
SDL is used.
JosephOn Fri, Nov 28, 2014 at 01:11:43PM +0100, Altair Linux wrote:
Hello,
I use Debian Wheezy and I not found in Google a GUI for SDL. I found
some proyects (wxwidgets, Qt, etc) but is not really for use in SDL.
I try other projects (agar, sdl-widgets, etc), but not are very
powerful and flexible and other mature and stable project like
wxwidgets.
I think a native GUI like wxwidgets are good idea.
P.D: yes, my English isn’t that good.
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