Noooo! Fool! You'll get us all involved in the Allegro vs SDL battle again

Anyway, my $0.02:
If you're using it and you like it - stick with it. If you like something, chances are you'll learn to use it better, and that's what counts in the end.

Do a search for "libsdl" on these forums and you'll bring up some discussions. (You cannot search for SDL, as it ignores words 3 characters or fewer.)

The main difference between Allegro and SDL is that SDL is designed only to be a thin layer between hardware and the programmer. This means that Allegro has more features, but that SDL is slimmer.

Allegro and SDL also do some things differently, but they both get it done.

We really cannot tell you which you'll like better. Try them both out and see for yourself.

If your looking for alternatives I would suggest ClanLib (clanlib.org) .. its very nice. I would say its much less old school in its approach thus has its pros and cons, because its very diffrent from allegro.

Clanlib seems to be overkill for the situation (learning OpenGL, etc.), although it is quite feature rich.

SDL supports OpenGL internally (it lets you initialise a OpenGL drawing surface directly) plus has routines to interface with OpenGL builtin. Since, you want to learn OpenGL eventually, it might a be a good option. But then Allegro does have a lot more functionality. Sound, Input devices, etc. can be quite painful to use in SDL. As said before, SDL is a layer between the hardware and you, so you have to write quite a lot of code to make it work.

BTW, the SDL documentation itself has quite a bit of tutorial stuff in it. Download the package and see if it meets your demands.

It's all about requirements.

Hmm... I think I should seriously take a look at SDL, just so I can formulate an opinion when this topic comes up again.

Then again, I barely have time to work on my Allegro projects...

SDL supports 2d hardware a little better than Allegro, but not enough for anyone I've ever mentioned that to on here to care in practice, whereas Allegro does indeed offer many more "features" in terms of out of the box support for file formats etc. With SDL you get BMP and WAV and not much more. With Allegro you have at least (off the top of my head) LBM, PCX, BMP, TGA, VOC and WAV plus those datafile things that some people seem to actually like. For OpenGL purposes, the only benefit AllegroGL has over SDL is that the usual 2d functions continue to be emulated in GL mode. With SDL you must download an add on library to achieve the same thing. If you're a heavy advocate of modularity as I am, you might prefer to see this as a benefit of SDL over AllegroGL. Case in point : I recently wrote a remake of the old ZX Spectrum game Cannonball, the main reason being to play around with volumetric shadows. My .exe was 8kb. It would have taken about 1 minute to change the code from being SDL based to being AllegroGL based or vice versa. So my real decision was whether I wanted a ~450kb DLL or a ~90kb one.

SDL is probably more popular because it follows market forces. The Allegro developers seem to believe that Allegro has a divine right to exist and that decisions on its future should be made based on what they personally would prefer. If that makes a user unhappy, then that user can go find some other library. For example, take the decision to stick with underscores in function names for the forseeable despite this not being the case in either of the big 2 game related libraries (DirectX and OpenGL), the standard C/C++libraries (stdlib or STL), or almost any other popular game library (I had a glance at ClanLib, CDX, SDL ...)

For the record, SDL has a complete Mac port, and I think I read somewhere either already comes with all new Mac's on the CD that includes GCC, or will in the future. In addition, SDL is bundled with Kylix and the PS2 Linux kit.

SDL can be used on delphi/kylix? Curious...

I have faith that allegro 5 will blow SDL away. ;-) Especially with c++ wrappers I've been messing around with...

Marcello

Or, to put it in the thoughts of the developers : it would be stupid to listen to public opinion (we automatically know what is best).

This is indeed probably the route of the problem. In a world where fifteen different incompatible SVGAs existed and games ran in a severely backward OS with no decent hardware interface for this sort of thing, Allegro clearly had a mandate. Now it does not.

It has been questioned by people other than me why Allegro doesn't just have, e.g. an SDL target and therefore concentrate on its benefits over SDL (greater support for file formats, more of the features Shawn thought we might like such as the GUI, etc), instead of trying to compete when there is no reason and in a situation where SDL seems to be winning the popularity contest. The big bonus would be that Allegro would no longer restrict people who want good hardware access by not supporting any hardware which the developers decide we don't want to use.

Since at the end of the day you'd still be able to just download a single Allegro ZIP file, which would compile and offer the Allegro API across all the previous targets and many new ones - although Mac is the only one really significant - I don't see why this is a problem. Maybe after so many years of seeing people reproduce (often simply as a good education for themselves) Pac Man, Space Invaders, Pong, etc ad infinitum they've lost sight of the vast benefits of not unnecessarily splitting the market?

Okay. But conversely, SDL supports multithreading, so we can use our modern operating systems in a modern fashion, rather than pretending they are just DOS in new clothing.

As I said, SDL comes with Kylix, so you'd like to think so! Seriously though, from the little I know, I've seen Delphi/Kylix wrappers for most popular C/C++ libraries so I have no doubt you can use Allegro also.

It's really a case of 'you say tomato, I say tomato' (hmm, that doesn't work without sound )
You can take allegro and add some libraries, or take SDL and add other libraries, to end up with the functionality you want (pretty much, no doubt there's something that one or the other won't do)

I do think SDL seems to be used in more commercial products, and maybe is better known. But allegro has a more 'fun' community, that's my opinion.

Thomas H's arguments don't all make sense - Allegro does have a right to exist, for as long as the developers want to work on it. And, they're doing it for free, so it is up to them what goes in, surely. Is the SDL development process more open? I don't know.

For me, I know allegro, and I like allegro.cc. I have no reason to learn SDL.

Pete

Yup. I learned most of C hacking games and utitlities together with allegro

Then write that too. nothing complicated there. the only reason the Alsa rawmidi driver for allegro (in linux) exists, is becasue I had a need. Look at the AllegroGL project, they saw a need wrote the code, and modified allegro to work with it. Someone just needs a big enough reason to do the work.

Listening to public opinion ?
What do you think ?
If you want it, code it. If you don't, you'd be arrogant to expect others to code it how you like.
But you can still voice your opinion, of course, like I do