Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) is a cross-platform multimedia library that creates an abstraction over various platforms' graphics, sound, and input APIs, allowing a developer to write a computer game or other multimedia application once and run it on GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac OS Classic, Mac OS X, BeOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, QNX, IRIX, and a few other unofficially ported platforms. It manages video, events, numeric audio, CD-ROM sound, threads, and timers.

Sam Lantinga created the library, first releasing it in early 1998, while working for Loki Software. He got the idea while porting a Windows application to Macintosh. He then used SDL to port Doom to BeOS (see Doom source ports). Several other free libraries appeared to work with SDL, such as SMPEG and OpenAL.

The SDL is mainly coded in C but has bindings to many languages and exists on several operating systems.

SDL itself is very simple; it merely acts as a thin, cross-platform wrapper, providing support for 2D pixel operations, sound, file access, event handling, timing, threading, and more. OpenGL is often used with SDL to provide fast 3D rendering. It is often thought of as a cross-platform DirectX, although it lacks some of its more advanced functionality. SDL instead has a huge number of third party extensions that make it easy to do more advanced functions.

It is freely available open source and is licensed under the LGPL.

Bindings

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• Ada
• Basic (sdlBasic)
• C#
• D (Derelict)
• Eiffel
• Erlang
• Euphoria
• Guile
• Haskell (HSDL)
• Java
• Lisp
• Lua
• ML
• Objective C
• Pascal
• Perl
• PHP
• Pike
• Pliant
• Python (pygame)
• Ruby
• Smalltalk - SDLSmalltalk

.NET Binding

SDL.NET is a set of object-oriented CLS-compliant .NET bindings for the Simple DirectMedia Layer written by David Y. Hudson. It provides high-level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, TrueType fonts, various image formats, sound mixing, MPEG-1 movies and 3D hardware via OpenGL, 2D video framebuffer.

Extensions

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• SDL MPEG Player Library
• Widget Sets: Guichan and ParaGUI

External links

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• SDL.NET homepage
• SDL homepage

Games using SDL

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Image:OpenTTD-screenshot.png|OpenTTD Image:Battle_for_Wesnoth_0.9.6_tutorial.png|Battle for Wesnoth Image:Strogg_harvester_patrol.jpg|Quake 4 Image:NWN_luskan.jpg|Neverwinter Nights

See List of Games using SDL for a complete list

See also

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• Allegro
• OpenML
• DirectX
• OpenGL
• pygame ^* - a wrapper around SDL for Python
• SDL.NET - a .NET wrapper for SDL written in C#
• CRM32Pro - High level API built around SDL which provide you with all functions needed to develop games

External links

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• SDL website
• GameDev - a site dedicated to game development, programming, et cetera. Discussion space can be found here on gamedev.
• The Game Programming Wiki's SDL Tutorials

Computer and video game development | Computer graphics | C libraries | Application programming interfaces

Simple DirectMedia Layer | Simple DirectMedia Layer | LibSDL | Simple DirectMedia Layer | SDL | Simple DirectMedia Layer | Simple DirectMedia Layer | SDL | Simple DirectMedia Layer | Simple DirectMedia Layer