Ok, I''m thinking of embarking on a mini project (2d tilebased, Windows primarily) but I can''t be bothered with a lot of the low level details. Gets boring. So I''m checking out libraries to speed up development. The 3 main ones that come to mind are mentioned in the title: ClanLib, Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL), and CDX. ClanLib and SDL seem to be pretty thorough and portable. ClanLib seems to have nice and simple scripting support, but documentation looks patchy. SDL on the other hand appears to be well documented, with lots of tutorials etc, but lacks any easy scripting by the looks of things. CDX seems like a nice wrapper for DirectX but not too comprehensive. I appreciate that my viewpoints above are based on a cursory glance at the websites, so I wanted to know if other people have used these libraries, and can give me better feedback on (a) ease of use, (b) stability/reliability, (c) documentation, (d) scripting support, and (e) overall satisfaction with the library.

I would have to recommend SDL. It''s quite well designed, and fairly simple. It has been used in numerous commercial projects (e.g. Loki''s ports). Speaking of ports, it''s very, very portable . I don''t know what kind of scripting support it has, though.

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Martee
http://www.csc.uvic.ca/~mdill

Out of those choices I''d have to recommend SDL.

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