Development of SDL Controls

[igor84]

Hello, I recently posted this on Delphi-Games and JEDI-SDL yahoogroups list:

Hello everybody! I wasn't very active here for some time but I managed to get almost to the end of Electrotehnic faculty and now I got a job so again I don't have mush free time. But I was thinking that maybe I could use some of that free time to return to developing my SDL Controls ( http://sdlcontrols.sourceforge.net).

I would like to make them very adaptable so that they could easily be used not just with SDL and OpenGL but with GLScene, DirectX, maybe even GDI. I have many other high goals (become concurrent with Qt and gtk but also with a possability of using in games , but I would go one step at a time. I am not sure I could devote enough time to this so I am not sure I will develop them further, but before I decide I would like some response from you.

I would like to know if any of you guys use my controls, how many of you, if any of you is interested in using them and if any of you is interested in helping me develop them.

Ian Munro advised me to come here (thanks). I did and my eye cought that announcement about Alpha Controls. Man that got me down. Will I ever have time to make something that beautiful? I was already shooting high and this is only getting my goals higher. So what do you think, guys? Can we make open source, all purpose, cross platform, language independent, library independent, skinable controls with amazing performance, or is my idea just stupid

[cairnswm]

Hi

I think a set of controls like that would be great. I am working on a similar system to make a set of generic interfaces on top of a variety of libraries for 2D game development.

(I almost have it working on top of SDL with OpenGL, and Phoenix - hope to find time to make it work with DirectX in the near future)

My set of libraries contains about 12 units currently. Only 2 of these change between the two target libraries, the other 10 stay exactly the same. This means that making a 2D game stays the same irrespective of which underlying libraries are used. (All you do is changing the environment library paths to point to the base libraries).

Cheers

[WILL]

Hey Igor, welcome to PGD!

I remember your SDL Controls from way back when. I was wondering if you would update them. Personally I like the idea of having SDL based controls.

To be honest though, I have moved away from SDL rendering and am now using OpenGL [size=9px](and SDL for windows management)[/size] for rendering. I'd love to have a set of visual controls for my future game projects as making menus and controls for them can be a royal pain to do yourself.

What is the possibility of you being able to make a new version that allows for both SDL and OpenGL rendering easily?

[igor84]

To WILL: That is really way back because on my site there is a version which can use OpenGL just as plain SDL since 2005. Pay attention to TSDLGL... classes on http://sdlcontrols.sourceforge.net/sdldraw.htm

To cairnswm: Before I sent my mail I was looking around this please and I found and downloaded your libraries. I had a quick look over them and it seams to me that we have some similarities in our work. Anyway, for my controls to be able to work on all libraries they will need just what you are making only I wasn't aiming for simplicity but complete usability.

[cairnswm]

To cairnswm: Before I sent my mail I was looking around this please and I found and downloaded your libraries. I had a quick look over them and it seams to me that we have some similarities in our work. Anyway, for my controls to be able to work on all libraries they will need just what you are making only I wasn't aiming for simplicity but complete usability.

The secret about making it usable in the highest number of scenarios is the ensure that the interface stays EXACTLY the same each time. So doesn't matter what underlying library I want to use I always have exactly the same properties, methods etc for each component. This means that the developer can work on whichever underlying libraries are easiest for him, and then switch to whichever set of libraries he wants to release to.

For example I might decide that on windows I want to stick with DirectX because of the OS support for it, but the same game can be released for Linux (with just a recompile) using OpenGL and for MacOS using SDL. As the developer all I need to do is chnage which path I am using.