[SDL] SDL 1.3 roadmap...

[Rhythmic Fistman]

On 10/8/07, sdl-request at lists.libsdl.org <sdl-request at lists.libsdl.org> wrote:

> From: "Ryan C. Gordon" <icculus at icculus.org>
> I finally got around to writing this up. Here's the rough roadmap for
> SDL 1.3 (eventually, 2.0) ...
>
> http://icculus.org/cgi-bin/finger/finger.pl?user=icculus&date=2007-10-07&section=sdl13
>
> Nothing is set in stone, so comments are welcome. Sam has already rocked
> through an alarmingly high percentage of this list, even though the list
> talks about things that will be done as opposed to things that ARE done
> in most cases.

Nice move getting rid of SDL_KillThread. A vestigial man page could perhaps
point the user to the SDL condition variable functions, useful for
politely asking
a thread to exit.

VERY well done for finally getting rid of SDLmain!  SDLmain was a terrible idea!
Just awful, I can't begin to tell you. How did that go forward for so long?


"""
2D acceleration: SDL can use OpenGL or Direct3D behind the scenes with
the 2D interfaces, so we can get acceleration on modern systems where
X11 or DirectDraw just aren't the fast paths anymore. The framebuffer-
oriented interfaces, like X11, are still there, though, for legacy
platforms and hardware.
"""

This could be good. I use the opengl interface in SDL 1.2 to get two
things done: vbl syncing (in the smooth animation sense of the word)
and interpolated scaling, to take up as much of the screen as possible.*
Unfortunately, on windows, (let's not mention linux) using opengl was
a very suck-it-and-see experience I guess thanks to spotty drivers.
You may or may not get syncing, you may or may not get intelligible
output, and when you quit you may or may not have a usable system.
Obviously you can't make this the default behaviour, but equally you
can't really ask the user to try a graphics mode that'll leave their
monitor a skew-whiff mess. Even with an "are you sure?" step. However,
I suppose most monitor control panels do this. I didn't try resetting
the video mode on the skew-whiff machines - I just reset them and
snuck out of the internet cafe.

So I guess my questions here are: will this 2D interface do HW
accelerated scaling? Will it support vbl syncing? Will we be
able to tell when it cannot do these things?
And can we make the subsystem prefer Direct3d on windows?

P.S. The mac, like on windows, now finally allows non-square pixel
video resolutions, but there's no way to select them in SDL 1.2.
Not even by passing 0x0 which should give you the current mode.
If the current mode is  "stretched" SDL resets the resolution to non-stretched.
Bugger.

* SDL letterboxing has never been terribly reliable. It didn't position
properly with opengl and the handling of mouse events wasn't consistent
across systems. To have opengl acceleration AND a constrained cursor
I had to roll my own letterboxing. It's obviously a design pimple that
doesn't play well with all the modes that SDL supports. Why not remove it?

That's about it, keep up the great work, guys!
RF