What do you people think about SDL? Is it going to hang around and be actively developed in the future? The only reason I ask is I -thought- SDL was an offshoot of stuff Loki was doing...and Loki is totally gone now (sadly). I''d hate start using SDL, and then find its development sort of tail off leading no where. In terms of long term project maintainability, is it worth using SDL? Who exactly is developing this library anyway? If it said on the website, I must have missed it.

quote: Original post by Shadow Mint
What do you people think about SDL? Is it going to hang around and be actively developed in the future?

Yes, without a doubt. It''s free software.

quote:
The only reason I ask is I -thought- SDL was an offshoot of stuff Loki was doing...and Loki is totally gone now (sadly).

No, IIRC Loki was allowed to statically link to SDL. That is, they were granted a non-free license by the owner of the library. They also worked on SDL as it was their main multimedia library. The owner (see below) of SDL was employed by Loki.

quote:
I''d hate start using SDL, and then find its development sort of tail off leading no where. In terms of long term project maintainability, is it worth using SDL?

Yes, it''s here to stay. SDL 1.3 is on its way.

quote:
Who exactly is developing this library anyway? If it said on the website, I must have missed it.

Sam Lantinga is the copyright owner and the developer of SDL (former employee of Loki and now working for Blizzard). A lot of people are also actively working on it. If Sam ever becomes unable to maintain it, someone else will do it.

Hope this helps.

quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster

Sam Lantinga is the copyright owner and the developer of SDL (former employee of Loki and now working for Blizzard). A lot of people are also actively working on it. If Sam ever becomes unable to maintain it, someone else will do it.

Hope this helps.

Does this mean that Blizzard might start using SDL for their games? ( it''s just a question, no pun intended. )



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quote: Original post by Cyberdrek

Does this mean that Blizzard might start using SDL for their games? ( it''s just a question, no pun intended. )

AFAIK Sam''s developing Windows games there, like the rest of the employees, and not porting to other platforms. Therefore I doubt that SDL will be used by Blizzard.

The only reason I started doing C was because SDL took care of some of the [in my humble opinion] harder things, such as playing music, sounds, playing images and dealing with double buffering, etc.

For someone like myself needing only a few lines of code to load and display a bitmap is brilliant.

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The short term outlook is very positive, however the long term outlook is not. The reason I cite this is due to the lack of bloodline support from Loki, as you know (sadly) went out of business. This means that SDL will be maintained in the short run but in the long run (as OS specific designers come up with more advanced and troublesome "features") SDL will have to keep up with that and only a dedicated maintainer can take care of that. This means that a major group needs to take over SDL at some point, just like GNOME taking care of ESounD when it was abandoned.

If you are asking about SDL as a short term solution to begin coding and learning the basics of game development, then it would be a smart choice. However if you want to use SDL for a serious long term project (or something that might become a long term project) I would lean away from that. SDL is primarely for projects looking for a commercial market, it may limit performance and features once you decide to make something a bit more "hard code" (in Linux games terms).


Our group has looked into SDL in the past, after several months of trials it was conclude that it would not be the best choice to use on a long term project.

I disagree with LearFox''s assessment. SDL was developed independently of Loki, and will continue to be developed in Loki''s passing. Latinga is doing a full rewrite of SDL to make it easier to use and more consistent, among other things. SDL has enough support where the open source community is actively contributing; it''s reached a critical mass, you could say. I think SDL has a very positive future.

I side with Null and Void. Many don''t understand the tangible benefit of an Open Source/Free Software project in terms of continuity. Even if the project development should completely lose momentum (unlikely) and not be updated for years, you can assume ownership/maintenance by emailing the author and asking. And since all the code is in the public domain, there are no messy copyright issues to handle unlike when one company purchases another''s assets (see Caldera and SCO).

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Thanks to Kylotan for the idea!

*shrugs* It was just a thought. I vaguely recall something about motif (original) which was similar; people started using it, other people started using it... something weird happened and suddenly getting hold of a motif library was really hard, and all of these applications just stopped being usable; because they all were like: O! Just get the motif XXX library to compile. And that was just not possible.

Until the open motif stuff came out, it was a bit of a mess with different people producing libraries with more or less functionality, and basically. Very bad.

Now, I know that was a different situation, and I''ve probably got the details wrong (I never really got into motif back then anyway; I''ve always prefered plain X stuff. In fact, I abhore it completely, now and then. =P), but I know from personal experience: downloading an old application (circa 95 say) and trying to compile it, if it requires motif is -still- a pain in the ass (maybe I''m just stupid. =P Last time I tried it took me about 1/2 an hour to find a link to download open motif. Luckily these day openmotif.org has a "download OpenMotif" link on the frontpage.)

My problem with SDL is that although it is open source (has to be, it''s out under the LGPL), its not exactly clear who is developing it, except that it''s sam''s brain child. If he suddenly fell off the planet, what would happen? I presume eventually somebody would pick up the source code and start trying to develop it actively...but still.

There''s a big difference between free source code, and open, accountable design and development.

Anyway, just my 2c worth. ATM I just use sdl as a comparison to clock various graphical projects. I

There''s an SDL development mailing list. I guess that if Sam Latinga would just disappear, continuation of the project would be organized from this list. It''s not like there is no community around SDL

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