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A topic by iarwain created May 26, 2021 Views: 315 Replies: 5

Viewing posts 1 to 3

iarwain3 years ago (1 edit)

Hi everyone,

I like the limitations of this game jam and I was wondering if here would be a good place to discuss alternatives to SDL, which is a great library albeit fairly low-level, with a basic feature set.

Disclaimer: I'm the main developer behind an open source 2D engine (which I will only name if I get the greenlight) that packs a lot of features and yet has a rather small disk footprint: between 550kb and 740kb, without any additional dependencies, depending on the set of features that have been selected when building it (physics engine, mouse support, joystick support, ...).

Thanks in advance!

EpicTmL1343 years ago

An alternative to SDL would be SFML or OpenGL, In my opinion

iarwain3 years ago

SFML is indeed an alternative to SDL, but at the same level. None of these options include features of a higher level engine (things like a game loop, object/entity management, data-driven definitions, physics, input abstraction, etc...).

OpenGL is lower level library and only handles graphics, it's not an alternative to SDL/SFML per se, however if one wants an OpenGL-centric alternative to these libraries, I'd recommend checking GLFW.

EpicTmL1343 years ago

Other people might like glfw but I personally use WIN32 api

danielmcnz3 years ago

I had to re-read what you said when you called SDL low level

iarwain3 years ago

Yes, maybe my original post wasn't very clear. There are lower-level framework/libraries that focus on hardware/OS abstractions, such as SDL, SFML, GLFW, for example.

Then they are higher level game engine, which often relies on those libraries to provide portability across target platforms, which brings higher level features such as a game loop, physics, object/entity management, resource management, etc.

Some of the most popular engines out there at the moment are Godot, Unity, Unreal, GameMaker, etc. However one might struggle to hit the 4mb limit when using those.

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