SDL - wow!!!

[miriam_e]

 
SDL - Simple DirectMedia Layer

SDL is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer. It is used by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many popular games, including the award winning Linux port of "Civilization: Call To Power."

Simple DirectMedia Layer supports Linux, Windows, BeOS, MacOS Classic, MacOS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, Solaris, and IRIX. There is also code, but no official support, for Windows CE, AmigaOS, Dreamcast, Atari, QNX, NetBSD, AIX, OSF/Tru64, and SymbianOS.

SDL is written in C, but works with C++ natively, and has bindings to several other languages, including Ada, Eiffel, Java, Lua, ML, Perl, PHP, Pike, Python, and Ruby.

http://www.libsdl.org

Comments

[apocraphilia.livejournal.com]

Choice of scripting-language/scripting-method is a bit of a paradigm choice. If it's about effects and control, I'd say use a full-function scripting language like Perl/Python/PHP/Objective C etc, for control over every polygon. If it's more about ease of use (and you choose to put more of the power into the display engine instead of the script) I'd lean towards just an XML schema, like:

[movie]
[room name="Lounge"]
[actor name="Simon" mesh="simon.obj"/]
[action type="say" source="Simon"]Wassup?[/action]
[/movie]

I thought recently about a text-based Java adventure game engine that used XML like this, what I'm describing is just a more ambitious version of that.