The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5)

Which SDK better?

I am interested in indie game development. I realize there is so much to be done, and the less I have to do on my own, the better it is. I chose to go the "black box" way, trying to use as much "already-written" code as possible to reduce development time.

I have been looking around for LGPL game SDKs. It turns out there are quite a few. However, before committing to one, I thought it would be a good idea to shoot an e-mail here and see which of these SDKs you people might have used in the past, and what kind of experiences you had.

I am aware of the following:

PLIB >> http://plib.sourceforge.net/
ClanLib >> http://www.clanlib.org/
Fltk >> http://www.fltk.org/
Allegro >> http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/allegro/
SDL >> http://www.libsdl.org/index.php

I would like to stay away from DirectX since it is a Microsoft-only approach. I have nothing against it. I would just prefer a multi-platform solution if possible.

If I am missing an SDK that is even better than the ones I mentioned, please do let me know.

Your input is greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Black Box
Friday, January 2, 2004

Try this website: http://www.dexterity.com

Check out the articles and post this on that forum.

SDK's are not all roses either.

1. You have to learn the SDK.
2. SDK's have bugs and caveats.

Friday, January 2, 2004

You are going to be hard pressed to create a true cross-platform game. I would stick with OpenGL and C.

Friday, January 2, 2004

SDL and OpenGL works great for multiplatform game programming.

Godless
Friday, January 2, 2004

You'll have to read up a bit about the pros and cons working OSS software like SDL and friends, but yeah, what they said.

Not to discourage you or anything, but making game development profitable is not a pot of roses, if it helps for you to concentrate, just pick up a few PocketPC + Win32 api books and try to grok 2D card game coding enough to the point to get those bored economy class on United and British Air to buy a few off of your website--and then from there (with money in your pocket) open your own multinational 3D virtual MMORPG addiction development center. Otherwise you'll be looking at quite a long march.

Li-fan Chen
Saturday, January 3, 2004

Well, SDL is the most commonly used SDK for programming cross-platform games. ClanLib is, I believe second place. So I suggest you go with SDL, because it's the most commonly used and you'll find more people who can help you with it.

I toyed a bit with SDL, and it seemed very nice from what I had to do with it.

Shlomi Fish
Saturday, January 3, 2004

Oh my god! Allegro and DJGPP... The memories...

I wrote a small 3d engine in c with DJGPP and Allegro during my first year at university.

Later i turned it into c++.

I remember running to get my parents to look at the flat lambert shaded 30,000 polygon 747 rotating on the screen. Rotating slowely, very slowely.

And then the weeks trying to get Gouraud shading happening.... Ahhh I feel warm and fuzzy.

When i used it Allegro was just for the DJGPP compiler, I am sure that is not the case now.

It provided video initialisation functions, putpixels and shape fillers and also audio initialisation, wav playing functions and the like.

Very easy to use.

I don't work in the games industry but
my general advice on your question of which sdk to use is to pick one and make a start.

If you are a beginer you are better off selecting the simplest and pushing it to its limits rather than selecting some commercial quality set of libraries that you will wrestle with, become discouraged and abandon.

If you are a pro then you probably dont need advice.

braid_ged
Monday, January 5, 2004

Thank you for all your responses. I think l will go with the SDL & OpenGL combo for now and see what happens.

Black Box
Monday, January 5, 2004