[SDL] 2D API evolution (SDL 1.3/2.0)

[David Olofson]

On Tuesday 15 August 2006 16:40, Stephane Marchesin wrote:
[...]
> Before you go further about adding features, please consider the
> example of hardware accelerated rotation support. I don't know of
> many graphics accelerators that can do hardware rotation and have no
> OpenGL/DirectX support. The only ones that comes to mind are game
> consoles like nintendo's super famicom (which is not supported by
> SDL anyway).

This suggests that there are only two viable target APIs for "advanced 
2D" - but that's still one too many. Also, both are too hard to learn 
and too messy to deal with if you just want to add some scaling and 
rotation to your otherwise very basic 2D application.

How about this:

	* Keep the SDL 2D API pretty much as is.
	  (Primarilly focused at providing good support
	  for systems without OpenGL or Direct3D.)

	* Add support for applications to use Direct3D
	  directly, like OpenGL is used with SDL 1.2.

	* Implement any "advanced 2D" API, portable
	  subset of OpenGL or whatever, as an
	  add-on library for SDL. Such a library can
	  (should!) of course support both OpenGL and
	  Direct3D, and preferably also provide a
	  software rasterizer.


//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate

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