Open Source Game Library
By admin on May 29, 2011 in open source
SFML
SFML is a portable and easy to use multimedia API written in C++. You can see it as a modern, object-oriented alternative to SDL.
SFML is composed of several packages to perfectly suit your needs. You can use SFML as a minimal windowing system to interface with OpenGL, or as a fully-featured multimedia library for building games or interactive programs.
- Portable
SFML compiles on standard platforms like Windows (98, 2000, XP, Vista) and Unix systems (Linux, Mac OS X). As the library grows up, support for more operating systems will be added. - Object-oriented
SFML is written in C++ and provides an efficient, object-oriented design. It relies on standard patterns and idioms to provide a simple and robust framework. - Easy to use
SFML aims at being easy to manipulate. Effort is put on internal code to provide the simplest public interface. - Flexible
Instead of being one big API, SFML rather contains a lot of small packages, that can be chosen and combined according to the intended usage. You can use only the base package to get input and windowing, as well as the full graphics package with sprites and post-effects. - Easily integrable
SFML can be used in one or more windows, and/or can be integrated in existing interface components. Integration with existing graphical user interface (GUI) libraries is easy, so that you can add SFML views into complex interfaces built with Qt, wxWidgets, MFC or whatever.
SFML is available in the following languages :
- C++
- C
- .Net (C#, VB.Net, C++/CLI, …)
- Python
- D
- Ruby
SDL
Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low 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."
SDL supports Linux, Windows, Windows CE, BeOS, MacOS, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, Solaris, IRIX, and QNX. The code contains support for AmigaOS, Dreamcast, Atari, AIX, OSF/Tru64, RISC OS, SymbianOS, and OS/2, but these are not officially supported.
SDL is written in C, but works with C++ natively, and has bindings to several other languages, including Ada, C#, D, Eiffel, Erlang, Euphoria, Go, Guile, Haskell, Java, Lisp, Lua, ML, Objective C, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Pike, Pliant, Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, and Tcl.
SDL is distributed under GNU LGPL version 2. This license allows you to use SDL freely in commercial programs as long as you link with the dynamic library.
Allegro
Allegro 4 and Allegro 5 are cross-platform, libraries mainly aimed at video game and multimedia programming and also websites dedicated to boost games as this page and others. They handle common, low-level tasks such as creating windows, accepting user input, loading data, drawing images, playing sounds, etc. and generally abstracting away the underlying platform. However, Allegro is not a game engine: you are free to design and structure your program as you like.
According to the Oxford Companion to Music, Allegro is the Italian for «quick, lively, bright». It is also a recursive acronym which stands for «Allegro Low LEvel Game ROutines». Allegro was started by Shawn Hargreaves in the mid-90’s but has since received contributions from hundreds of people over the net.
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