Quote Originally Posted by Darkhog View Post
Also are you sure JEDI-SDL is not updated anymore? I've look here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jedi-sdl/ and in Last update it says some date in May 2013. If Dominique is not doing it, maybe it's someone else?
Really?! Well that's a surprise.

Well to be honest I'm not too sure what he's been doing with it lately. I recall that he hadn't touched it in ages and I know that he was the last person that was managing the JEDI-SDL repository. He was working on adding better support for Mac when we talked last, but since then I have heard nothing. Perhaps he decided to poke around and clean up something or the odd missing files/demos or something.

On beginning...

Well truthfully I don't think that there has been quite as nice a beginner programmer's tool as there used to be for a time. Its not so much SDL's fault, but that of the landscape of all the tools changing so much in the last 5+ years. Lazarus was alright, but if you were learning on any platform other than Windows XP/7 you were practically up a creek. Delphi became office fodder that cost to much for anyone with any budget sense. And Oxygene wasn't what it is now.

I know someone is going to mention FPC so let me put this to rest. Straight FPC isn't the best for beginners and new programmers aren't going to be patient with ASCII IDEs, save those few "different" folks.

So to do it right you had just Lazarus and even there you had some issues for a short while.

Bringing SDL back to it's glory....

Hands down SDL had been the easiest to get into and start learning and it allowed you to easily learn and migrate to OpenGL while continuing to use it for those missing features from other API like DirectX's DirectInput, DirectSound and such. SDL was a good match, but then tools changed and setup became more involved and instructions and documentation less accurate with more exceptions causing you to do more reading and guesswork. Beginners, in some ways rightfully so, don't like too much of that right at the beginning.

If someone could foster a new set of headers for SDL 2.0 and maintain it well enough I could see it coming back as a good first game library for any potential beginners. It's the future of SDL so if Pascal developers want to keep current it'll need to be translated and kept up. Such is similar as the translating of the DGL OpenGL headers. Who else has brought the OpenGL headers up to 4.0? Not Embarcadero from what I've been told.