SDL Device created for Irrlicht.

sirshane · Post by **sirshane** » Sun Nov 23, 2003 10:08 am

Hey everyone. I've just finished adding a basic SDL device. This allows Irrlicht to *theoretically* work on all platforms that SDL works on. This includes embedded devices, video game consoles, Windows, Linux, Irix, MacOS X, *BSD, Solaris, etc, etc...

It works good so far, but it's still loading textures the normal way. I plan to make texture loading go through SDL_Image so it loads the entire slew of different formats supported. This will add support for png, etc.

I know this adds a dependency to Irrlicht, but I think the advantages are worth it. Besides, if you don't want to use SDL with Irrlicht, you don't have to compile support for it.

Pretty soon i'm going to be working on making Irrlicht endian independent so it'll finally work on PPC machines.

If anyone wants me to post the modified files to get Irrlicht to use SDL, let me know and i'll put them on my website.

Note that SDL only uses OpenGL for hardware 3D.

xample · Post by **xample** » Sun Nov 23, 2003 4:21 pm

Yep, I'm very much interested. Could You put it online?

Tequilla · Post by **Tequilla** » Sun Nov 23, 2003 8:21 pm

Hmm... little, stupid question: What is SDL???

sirshane · Post by **sirshane** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 6:00 am

I'll have a zip with the new files uploaded to my website the first chance I get.

SDL is a library, similar to Direct X, that is also cross platform. You can find information about it at www.libsdl.org.

sirshane · Post by **sirshane** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 8:30 am

I uploaded the zip file to my website. You can retrieve it here: http://venom.feralfox.net/sdl.zip. It includes an updated Makefile file for Unix, along with the various changed files. Just extract them into the root directory of the Irrlicht code base. I haven't modified the Win32 compile stuff...

I just noticed there might be a performance problem with SDL, at least under Linux. It seems that using X directly is significantly faster than using SDL, at least on one of my machines. The other machine I can't tell a difference. I'm not sure what's going on there.

Well, if you want, give it a try and see what happens.

niko · Post by **niko** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 9:39 am

nice code, do you like me to upload your device to the sourceforge server and announce this as newsitem on the homepage?

sirshane · Post by **sirshane** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 4:14 pm

Sure, that would be great.

Keep in mind that i've only tested it on Linux, however since it's platform independent anyway it shouldn't matter. If possible, can you change the Win32 project files to work with my code? I don't have a Windows machine I can do this on.

Thanks, Niko.