I spent some of this holiday weekend installing SFML 2.0 from their git repository. The install went fine (I had to remember to install both the Debug and Release versions). The default code displays a nice little image and plays a sound. Looking through their API documentation it looks like a pretty simple and nice library to use for graphics and audio. It’s very easy to create an image, and any number of sprites from that image to manipulate around the screen. All the functionality is there as needed. You can even mix in OpenGL code right with their drawing code if you need to.
Now for the bad. I’ve been playing around with taking simple user input and maneuvering the default image around the screen. However, on my machine, quite capable of this task, the sprite stutters across even though the framerate stays steady. Perhaps I just haven’t figured out some oddness in how the key presses get handled, but I’m following their examples pretty closely. I’m going to look into it more, but initial impression has me frustrated.
Well, after a bit of discussion and testing, we’ve settled on our main libraries for Project Ballersauce (ok, we haven’t actually picked a codename yet). As stated earlier, we need cross platform libraries as we are not all on Mac machines. We’ve currently settled on:
Simple and Fast Multimedia Library for our graphics.
Chipmunk Physics to handle all of our platformer physics and collision stuff.
It’s now time to start playing around with these libraries and figure them out. If any cool stuff comes out of it I’ll post screenshots!
The largest Mac Game Programming contest ever is officially announced. It begins July 1st and runs for 3 months. There’s going to be plenty of sweet prizes and I’m definitely excited to enter. The last uDevGames was in 2008, I believe I started a couple entries but never got very far. This year I’m going to be working with a couple of my coworkers at VOKAL to try to make a competitive entry! Our team may be a bit bigger than I’m used to, but it should be quite awesome. More information about uDevGames can be found at http://www.udevgames.com
I’m going to write more about our entry as the contest approaches and once we start. No code can start until July 1st, but we’re definitely planning out how we want our game to be. Our initial idea is pretty cool so we’ll see how it goes! Currently we’re looking into a variety of cross-platform 2D Graphics libraries to see which will fit our needs best. Our current list I’m looking into are here:
http://www.libsdl.org
http://www.glfw.org/
http://www.sfml-dev.org/
http://love2d.org/wiki/love
Ideally we have it narrowed down by next week and a greater design document for our game as well. I’ll be posting tidbits from it soon I hope!