Is there an alternative to SDL 1.3 for a C++ game that should run on iOS and Android?

Posted by futlib on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by futlib
Published on 2012-12-02T13:05:48Z Indexed on 2012/12/02 17:22 UTC
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I've used SDL for many desktop games, always as the cross-platform glue for:

  • Creating a window
  • Processing input
  • Rendering images
  • Rendering fonts
  • Playing sounds/music

It has never disappointed me at those tasks.

But when it comes to graphics, I prefer to work with the OpenGL API directly, even though all of our games are 2D.

In the project I'm currently working on, I've made sure to only use the API subset supported by both OpenGL 1.3 and OpenGL 1.0, so making the thing run on Android should be easy, I thought.

Turns out there is no official Android or iOS port of SDL yet. However, there's one in SDL 1.3, which is still in development.

SDL 1.3 doesn't seem very appealing to me for three reasons:

  1. It's been in development for at least 4 years, and I have no idea when it will be done, not to mention stable.
  2. It's not ported to as many platforms as SDL 1.2.
  3. From what I've seen, it uses OpenGL for drawing, so I suppose the community will move away from directly using OpenGL.

So I'm wondering if I should use a different library for our current project - it doesn't matter much if I need to port my existing code from SDL 1.2 to SDL 1.3 or to some other library. We're planning to release on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, iOS and Android, so good support for these platforms is essential.

Is there anything stable that does what I want?

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