Game Development with SDL 2.0 (Steam Dev Days 2014)
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters link it when people ask about cross-platform game development and for details like SDL's licensing change.
What it is
Ryan Gordon (Icculus) gives a high-level overview of SDL 2.0 at Steam Dev Days 2014. He covers its features and how it eases building, porting and maintaining games, including Linux ports.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2015 to 2020.
What Hacker News said
Recommends EliRivers · 2015-04 · on “Ask HN: What are you using for cross platform games?”
SDL. It is solidly cross-platform (supports Haiku, which makes me smile, as well as Linux, Win, iOS, Android and so on and so on) and zLib licensed (pay nothing; use it, distribute it, static link, dynamic link, whatever you want - the zLib licence fits on a postcard). Here's someone talking about it at a steam dev day: [this video]
Cites ingenieros · 2016-08 · on “Playability Test of 100 Humble Bundle Games on Linux”
Most of those ports are being done by one lone developer named Ryan C. Gordon who runs icculus.org Here's a talk he did about porting games to Linux with SDL 2.0 during a Steam Dev Days event: [this video] One interesting thing to note is that most of those Linux ports can only be purchased through a Humble Bundle. (Playdead's Limbo is a case in point.) It goes without saying that the grand majority of those ports would have never happened if it weren't for Humble Bundle in the first place.
Cites git-pull · 2019-01 · on “Retro game engine for developers that enjoy creating games like it's 1997”
This is a cool project! - CMake, yay! These make generating build files for a variety of platforms (even Windows) a breeze. It also works with code completion stuff (CLion IDE, KDevelop both have CMake-based projects) - I like how it splits stuff up as well ( [LINK] ). - As for vendorizing SDL2, there is an opportunity for optimization: The shared libraries and header files can be scanned through CMake scripts. Example: [LINK] . - I see the .clang-format file, nice! (This is for clang-format: [LINK] ) Unfortunately, license is going to be a real barrier to most game developers. The ironic thing is this engine includes SDL 2 which prides itself on being on a permissive license. ( [this video] , 6:
Cites tony · 2020-01 · on “Pygame Zero: Creating games without boilerplate”
Incredible! The sphinx docs look great. Also, the logo! Not to mention, the translations: - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] One reason of why I wouldn't use it yet: LGPL. This is the issue pygame had when I tried it. The license made it very difficult to incorporate and use in practice, and I ended up playing with kivy instead ( [LINK] ). The reasons why: 1. Writing anything commercial would be a gamble. I've wrote at length on why this license isn't meant for scripting languages, but even if it's a compiled language, SDL moved away from LGPL here: [this video] . 2. LGPL and scripting languages just don't work from an open source perspective. It's not copy-paste and vendorize friendly. Functions can't b