[LispM-Hackers] YA graphics library, but this might be the one...

[John Morrison]

Hi;

We looked at using SDL here at the Day Job for writing cross-platform
soldier training "games," but apparently the support under Windows was
spotty (we actually built it and tested it) -- the real priority for the
Linux types was Linux, and Windows was an afterthought -- some stuff
just didn't work at all.  All the "real" Windows game applications used
DirectX (even, to my consternation, some of ours) and not SDL.  So, we
blew it off (however the Day Job requirements do NOT match what we need
here, and are arguably a lot more intense -- video codecs, etc.).

For less "game-like" applications, we used to use WxWindows
(www.wxwindows.org) which was pretty good.  Unbeatable license.  Lowest
Common Denominator functionality.  However, since it simply wraps win32
and one of GTK/Motif/xt, it should have substantial font support (in a
reasonably portable way).

However, as of today (speak of the devil), we are switching EVERYTHING
to Qt, which is a much more ambitious toolkit than WxWindows, and which
has licensing issues (although they're probably not killer here).


"James A. Crippen" wrote:
> I was just looking at how SDL would do text rendering.  Because games (the
> primary purpose for SDL) do text in so many different ways the core
> library doesn't include text rendering support, but there are a number of
> different flavors of extension libraries to support various forms of text
> rendering.  I looked at a couple, particularly one that does TrueType and
> another that uses a novel XML-based bitmap format.

I have to think that the font library support will be the killer thing
here.  Might be worth figuring out what API you need to support the ops
and prototype it in a couple of these...

Let us know what seems like the Right Thing.

-jm

-- 
==== John Morrison
==== MAK Technologies Inc.
==== 185 Alewife Brook Parkway, Cambridge, MA 02138
==== http://www.mak.com/
==== vox:617-876-8085 x115
==== fax:617-876-9208
==== jm@mak.com