SDL » SDL1
SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) is a library that provides an abstraction over hardware and facilitates writing multimedia.
SDL lets you create create windows and drawing areas, draw and manipulate pictures, paint images from files, play audio, communicate over the network, and interact with input devices.
SDL has been used in professional games. The Android version of the popular Angry Birds uses SDL.
There currently exist two main releases of SDL: SDL 1.2 and SDL 2. In Haskell, SDL 1.2 is fairly well supported, especially the basic packages for surface, image and audio manipulation. There have been several attempts at creating bindings for SDL2. At Keera Studios, we use these bindings for mobile applications, but there is a more recent effort at providing a well-maintained SDL2 library.
SDL 1.2 constitutes a great way to get introduced to game programming in Haskell: it runs on all major platforms, it is easy to get started with, and it presents most of the challenges that you will encounter also in other libraries. SDL 1.2 does not present an over-simplified programming environment: you can create commercial professional Haskell games using SDL1.2.
We are going to learn a few game programming and SDL programming concepts. Pay close attention, we will be coming back to these in later courses. In this part we will learn about multimedia, input handling and some of the intricacies of interacting with foreign libraries. At the end of this course, you should have written a fun and good-looking Haskell game using SDL 1.2.
- [A first example in SDL](SDL » SDL1 » Introduction)
- [Graphics in SDL](SDL » SDL1 » Graphics)
- [Input in SDL](SDL » SDL1 » Input)
- [Time in SDL](SDL » SDL1 » Time)
- [Audio in SDL](SDL » SDL1 » Audio)
- Maybe: Networking?
- Maybe: Threading?
- [Resources](SDL » SDL1 » Resources)
- [Summary](SDL » SDL1 » Summary)
- [A Game in SDL](SDL » SDL1 » Summary)
- Annex: Installation on different platforms
- Annex: Haskell quirks using SDL
