[ManaTroph]

Interesting debate. I'm not worried about a little complexity with SDL. After using direct draw, SDL can't be all that complicated. I'm just looking for something a little flexible and something i can pick up fairly quickly.

How about some testimonials, like how easy was it to pick up?
what features did you like best/worst? what exactly can you do with it? like can you do any special graphical effects with it? do you think those who use it grow out of SDL quickly?

also i've done a tiny bit of research on C++ win 32 programming (never found much usefull though), and could use some advice on how to get started on that. (like a good solid detailed tutorial)

thanks in advance guys
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[RedSlash]

By personal opinion, I don't see any part of SDL being even remotely complex. I found SDL easy to learn--a little too easy. If there was anything that I'd have to complain about is the lack of features and the size of the library for such little features. SDL gives you the basics of the basics, so your graphics operations is usually limited to setup window, load bmp, and blit. The missing features can be supplemented by add-on libraries such as sdlimage, sdlmixer, etc. but that adds more bloat to your libs. If you are looking for a more complete solution, allegro is probably the better way to go. But for fast quick access to video card memory, SDL is king.

[valderman]

As RedSlash is saying, SDL provides you with a very easy platform independent way to access the basic building blocks of a game (video, audio, input and threading.) While it does well enough to stand on its own for input and threading, for more advanced graphics than 2D sprites, you will want to use OpenGL which, as previously mentioned, plays very well with SDL. (Five lines of setup code, compared to the >100 lines of setup required to use OpenGL with pure Win32 or Xlib.)

I don't see much point in using allegro instead because, frankly, there's only so much you can do with a 2D library. If you outgrow basic 2D functionality, chances are you'll soon outgrow any nother basic 2D library too.

[DeveloperX]

[ManaTroph]

Ok i have another question pertaining to win32 programming. (getting away from libraries) Pardon me if this sounds realy noobish, but i guess there's a way to use cout's still for printing text in some portion of your window. This would make for an easier convert to windows graphics style from text mode only. (making more of the code still usefull) I'm assumming this can be done. Let me know if i'm off on this one. Also i'm looking at using some kind of direct input both from mouse and keyboard, I guess I'll need a librarie for this too?
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[gdunbar]