I was wondering if anyone here has used SDL extensively, and if they would be willing to provide their opinion on it compared to other graphic API's out there (OpenGL, DirectX, etc)
From what I've read, it's got hardware accelleration capability.
Does anyone know if it can do alpha blending, scaling, rotation, etc.. (ie. effects you see in modern 2D games)
Thanks in advance for any input!
It was a long time ago but from memory the video part only really allowed for blitting of a sprite, pixel manipulation and allowing for a transparency colour.
Im guessing thats still the case as it is available on many platforms and as not all of those platforms have hardware rotation/scaling etc I wouldnt expect it to support it.
SDL should use directdraw on windows from what I remember. So it shouldn't be that slow for blitting things.
My 2d-in-3d library used to sit on top of sdl. So I've used it a good amount, but not really for doing old school, blit based 2d.
It lets you set up an opengl context pretty easy. From there you can do blending/scaling/rotation.... pretty much anything. Skys the limit, since you are just working with raw opengl.
But this means you would still have to roll your own 2d drawing functions.