Following my group intervention to get me off of WoW my additive personality has found something new to keep me up until two in the morning and alienate me from friends and family and I call it SDL.  Proof of my obsession is over 2000 unread RSS feeds, countless emails from Grumpy Gamer readers and no new "What I'm surfing" links.  I blame SDL.

For those of you unfamiliar: SDL (or more specifically libSDL) is a Open Source cross platform 2D graphics library that kicks butt.

While at my last company, I (along with Chris Blackwell, David Satnik and Rich Moe) created a 2D game engine called Sauce.  It was designed to be the next step beyond SCUMM.  SCUMM was a great system for it's day, but it suffered from the glaring problem of being too catered to making adventure games.  While at Humongous Entertainment we did some amazing things with SCUMM (Backyard (Base|Foot|Basket)ball) that it was never designed to do (and probably illegal in several southern states).

Given the opportunity to start from scratch on a game system, we created a system around a language that was much more C++ like, but had very power multitasking features (without all the semaphore issues) that are a requirement for games.  The system also had a slick memory manger that automatically removed and reloaded assets as they were needed.  On low memory systems it proved invaluable because the game programmer never had to worry about memory, things were just there when they were needed and gone when you didn't.  Sauce also contained a very powerful multi-layered animation system and a great animation editor designed and programmed by SCUMM alum Brad Taylor.

I continue to use the Sauce system to tinker with personal projects but it's graphic engine is really starting to show it's age.  The biggest issue is it has no ability to use alpha-channeled images and in todays high pressure competitive world of 2D graphics, that is a must.  It also has some limitations of only being able to use 8 bit images for multi-layered sprite cells.

Four days ago I learned a friend was prototyping a game in pygame, a python based game engine, and as a connoisseur of innovative game development engines I couldn't resist playing with it.  What intrigued me was the graphics back-end and how they were doing it, which lead me to libSDL.

The thing that immediately appealed to me about libSDL is the simplicity of the API.  In 10 lines of C code you can be blitting images across the screen.  No screwy windows set up or message loops.  No endless filling out of structs.  After a few hours of tinkering, I decided that it would make a perfect replacement for the graphics back-end to Sauce.

The first step was to try and integrate it into the render pipeline of the existing system.   After a day of struggles, I decided that I should just rewrite the whole pipeline.  Out went that chunk of code.  In went me new libSDL based system.  The graphics came up, but the tendrils of the rest of the system started to strain the code and I found myself kludging more and more to get it to function.  What I needed was to throw out the overall frame work, keeping just the important sub-systems (memory, asset loading, file io, etc).  Another day of mad obsessive rewriting and things were much cleaner, but I was still linking into a very large library that I wasn't using most of and the pieces I was using were hopelessly intertwined with the parts I wasn't.  What I needed was to strip everything away, so I  started a empty project, linked in the Sauce language interpreter and then proceeded to rewrite everything from scratch.  Another day without showers or food and I had it all up and running.  There is still a week of getting all the little things taken are of, but I am very pleased with the graphical results and libSDL.  I just got my old 800 MHz system up and running, so I will be doing some speed tests over the next week.

The great news of that due to the cross platform nature of libSDL, I will still have a Mac version of the Sauce system and am looking forward to spending some time figuring all that out.  Fun stuff.  Must shower more.

It's very addictive to be in (as Brad calls it) "the flow" of programming.  You can't type fast enough and everything is just pouring out in a stream of emotion disguised as code.  You are no longer looking in at the code, but you are inside it, and rather then pushing it to where you want it to go, it just flows around you.  I'm sure it's exactly what a writer experiences as a novel comes gushing out, or a powerful wizard as he wreaks havoc on the village peasants.

I just can't say enough great things about libSDL.  If you're in need of a good 2D back-end, this seems perfect.  Of course, there is a lot more to creating a good 2D game system, especially an adventure game system than graphics routines.   Sauce has a huge number of Foundation Classes specifically written for doing adventure games and those are all still useable in the new incarnation.

I do have a couple of issues with libSDL (I might be wrong about all these):

• You can't blit alpha-channel images into another alpha-channel image with the resulting alpha-channel being a combination of the two.  This makes pre-compositing difficult.

• Integrating libSDL into a MFC or other Windows GUI app seems difficult.  My next big tasks is to write a sprite compositor application and I want it to use a libSDL window for the graphics and standard Windows (or Mac) controls for everything else (in a separate window).  I'm sure there is a way to force this, but it's not natural.

• The libSDL sound system won't play mp3 or ogg files.  I have spotted some message thread fragments from people that seem to be doing it with a 3rd party lib, but they are spooling from disk.  I need them to play from memory.  I'll look into this more.  I could be wrong.  Like I was about the Zelda graphics (please stop sending me hate mail).

• The documentation is a little vague about when you can take advantage of hardware support.  My timing tests for enabling hardware or software blitting is identical so obviously it's never using the hardware.  There is probably a good reason why it's not, I just can't figure it out.

These issues aside, congratulation to the entire libSDL team and contributers for an amazing library.

And like a crack addict moving to heroin, I just download the Torque 3D engine...