Re: SDL vs GGI

[Ingo Ruhnke <grumbel@gmx.de>]

Pierre Phaneuf <pp@ludusdesign.com> writes:

> Also, Svgalib is in just about all distributions right now, but right
> after an install of Red Hat 6.0 that told me it detected my video
> hardware correctly (and it was right, X works perfectly), tell me why
> starting Quadra crashed my machine?

Because svgalib is just a plain hack, which doesn't support all gfx
card. It shouldn't be used anymore, there a better alternatives (GGI, fbdev).

> If GGI get a similar level of "support" by the distributions (just
> including the package, that is), tell me what would be the advantage of
> GGI over Svgalib? 

The main advantage of GGI, above any other gfx lib is that GGI is
display independent, it can run under console, using fbdev or svgalib
and can also run under X. If somebody ports it to another display
target, you would have another target for your game for free.

> If the advantage is that it at least work in X, then
> tell me why I wouldn't use Xlib instead and gain the ability to pop
> multiple windows and support cut & paste?

If you use Xlib directly you would lost the transparent access to the
display, you would be fixed to use X, console would be impossible or
require lots of extra work. And hey, why should a game have stuff like
multible windows and cut&past? If I want to play a game, then I want
to *play* the game and not play around with different popup windows
and cut&paste stuff. "Real games[tm]" must have the ability to run in
fullscreen! 
-- 
                                  http://dark.x.dtu.dk/~grumbel/pingus/ | 
Ingo Ruhnke <grumbel@gmx.de>             http://home.pages.de/~grumbel/ |
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