[IGDA_indies] SDL commercial viability

[Brian Hook]

> Have any commercial titles shipped with SDL *lately* ?

No idea.

> Last I checked 6 months ago, SDL doesn't do HW alpha blending.

In 2D space, few drivers do this at all, and even fewer do it 
correctly.  Most people that need this go to 3D ortho.

> alpha blending but it's slow.  I suppose some games can make do
> with anything, i.e. even plain old Windows GDI suffices.

Yes, crazy successful puzzle games use GDI just fine.

> I'm not
> sure if the OpenGL layer solves HW alpha blending problems

It does.

> or if
> using the OpenGL layer would create undesired deployment
> constraints.  Anyone know the answer?

SDL + OpenGL works fine.  The only real "gripe" with SDL is that it's 
LGPL, but that's trivial to work around.  Our puzzle games for Mac OS 
X and Linux run with SDL.

There's no denying that SDL is long in the tooth and a little crusty, 
but it _works_, at least for the subset of games that can live within 
its constraints.  If you're making a simple 2D game or a handheld PDA 
game or what have you, SDL is fine.  I don't do much 3D stuff anymore, 
so I don't care about a lack of DX9 support.

The fact is that 3D content generation is so monumentally expensive 
that it's tough for indies to even get a toe into that space.  This is 
much different than it was even 5 years ago.

Brian