All posts by

I was searching for a nice 2D graphics library today, again, because I wanted to piece something together very quickly. My requirements were:

• Should be available for the Mac so that I could code with my MacBook Pro on my lap. Currently I really prefer this way of coding. Screw dual monitors!
• Crossplatform would be a plus so that I could continue coding on the PC if need-be.
• Should have a somewhat modern C++ API, i.e. SDL was out of the question.
• Should provide basic shape drawing functionality (e.g. circles, lines,…) and font support (TTF or at least bitmap fonts) innately. SDL disqualified again.
• Either mature enough to be almost bug-free or still under active development.

I came up with something that was described as a “C++ version of SDL” somewhere. I must admit, this didn’t sound very promising to me at first, but when I digged a bit deeper, I became confident that this was what I was searching for.

http://www.sfml-dev.org/

SFML has everything I need plus lots of other cool features. And the best is, it even comes with pre-compiled OSX frameworks and XCode project templates to get you started directly.

The standard main.cpp looks somewhat like that. It’s pretty straightforward and you can jump right in and take care for the more important things:

#include <SFML/Graphics.hpp>

using namespace sf;

int main( int argc, char* argv[] ) {
    RenderWindow app( VideoMode( 640, 480 ), "SFML Graphics" );
    while( app.IsOpened() ) {
        Event event;
        while( app.GetEvent( event ) ) {
            if( event.Type == Event::Closed ) {
                app.Close();
            }
        }

        app.Clear();
        app.Draw( Shape::Circle( 200, 200, 100, Color::Yellow, 10, Color::Blue ) );
        app.Display();
    }

    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

The only thing I don’t like so far is the PascalCasing for method names, but hell, you can’t have everything, can you? So I’ll be using SFML for some debug graphics for another project I’m working on, DVW-related.

As an update on my article on 3D engines for the iPhone / iPod, Unity Technologies has announced the shipping of their 3D game development tool for iPhone starting on October 22nd, 2008. According to a heise news, prices will range from 400 to 1500 USD.

Yesterday, I digged deeper into the SIO2 3D engine which I mentioned in my last post. This is what I’ve thrown together in some hours of work. (Featuring a free model by Sven Daennart, one of my favorite 3D artists.)

The SIO2 API is very OpenGL-ish and features a bunch of C methods like “sio2ResourceGet”. It requires you to have one global attribute sio2 around which is the entry point into the engines internals, like the SIO2 window. (This is the point where it gets a bit annoying since every SIO2-related pointer in there starts with _SIO2… Hold on, I’m already using this sio2 global which you’re expecting me to have, so why do I need to type something like sio2->_SIO2window->_SIO2windowrender…?) I prefer an object-oriented approach anyway, so I started to wrap the engine into my own C++ classes which went pretty smooth so far. Fortunately, SIO2 comes with eight examples, each accompanied by YouTube video tutorials, and a skeleton project you can use for a jump-start. Moreover, a good part of the examples is documented inline, but still some API functions are lacking any documentation.

Featuring Theora video, OpenAL sound, Lua scripting and Bullet physics, SIO2 has an excellent basis to build upon. Still, there are drawbacks, e.g. it’s currently lacking support for skeleton based animation (but it’s in the works according to the page) and it doesn’t come with a scenegraph and thus doesn’t regard parent-child relationships modelled in Blender. Also, in order to attract some more people, there should be some written tutorials available since not everyone using it is a Blender expert also who can guess what the author is doing from watching the blurry and uncommented videos. But, don’t get me wrong here, I highly appreciate the excellent work and I’d just like to encourage the author to put more effort into documentation.