Re: Re: Re: Learning Game Design - seeking referrals

[flyingmoose]

Warning -- SDL is not a game engine by any means. It currently lacks basic primatives and things that keep programmers from expressing ideas such as "draw a square" simply.

Having written a few games in the past (experience in QBasic, Pascal, Assembler, C++ w/ Allegro, Tk, and OpenGL), SDL is a horrible place to throw a beginner. Once you feel up to the task (and provided you run something that has good/better SDL support) -- Perl + SDL may be ok. Until then, Perl + OpenGL may be a better option, or even C++ and OpenGL. Or Python + PyGame.

This is meant to dissuade gaming-beginers, not gaming experts. Those who want can make all of these work in Perl, it just won't be as easy as picking up PyGame or using C++ and OpenGL.

Game programming is quite fun, and I love doing it when I can find time... I'd just say that saying "SDL is what you want", well, it's misleading. SDL is a framework (and a hard to compile one when we are speaking of Perl bindings), it's prone to crashing/locking-up if not done right, etc...

This isn't a failing of SDL, it's just to say that SDL is nothing more than a hardware abstraction layer and a few other things. A quality game/sound library it is not.