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1. The Examples page for ClanLib seems like a joke. At the very least, this seems incredibly immature and unprofessional.

It was a joke. In the old days ClanLib had a large website that showed off what ClanLib could do. Yes, it can actually do some amazing things. But useful? That's another question...

ClanLib has potential. But without 100's of developers, it will not make it big time.

Note, I did not create ClanLib. But I worked with it for ten years.

We found that a large website took too much time to maintain. Nobody was interested. I don't blame them. Maintaining web pages is not much fun for hobbyist programmers.

Obviously, the rombust and the developers of ClanLib have never worked with a real game engine. It's already been noted that the claims in the summary are ridiculously ignorant (or outright shameful lies).

Let's examine the issue in details:

1. The Examples page for ClanLib seems like a joke. At the very least, this seems incredibly immature and unprofessional.
2. Not a single example of a real game written with ClanLib can be easily found. 16 years, and all they have to show for it is a feature in an old book on C++ game development.
3. No IDE... for game engines, the IDE is far more than a tool to write code - it's a way for a team of professionals to tie in their elements visually, in an organized way. It provides immediate feedback, which increases productivity.
4. ClanLib requires in-depth development before you see anything remotely operational in a game. Real game engines allow you almost immediate results, and even better, support scripting at a minimal level to create actual games (while allowing in-depth programming at the same time), because they already have a framework in place.

ClanLib has to deliver a LOT more than it currently does to be taken seriously. Unity, UDK, Corona, Adobe Air... all have options that allow developers to create games with no investment up front, and often no royalties at lower sales levels (and if you reach $100k sales, the fractional cost of the game engine is not really an issue). To be perfectly honest, I find it a bit insulting that this was presented on Slashdot the way it was. Slashdot-worthy? Questionable, but to tout it as a real competitor to Unity and UDK is downright wrong at every level.

Looking at http://www.khronos.org/registry/cl/api/1.0/cl_gl.h ,they are using the CL prefix. This will cause a huge headache for existing code that uses the ClanLib SDK. http://clanlib.org/docs/clanlib-0.9.0/reference/modules.html

### What I have found, and it is really a strange thing to me, but many projects simply do not want to accept contributions from artists.

I think the biggest problem isn't that they don't accept contributions from artists, but much more basic, most projects simply lack almost any kind of organisations. So nobody knows what needs to be done or when it should be done or even how. With engine coding that isn't to much of a problem, since everybody can just code a bit here and there and have his fun, maybe even producing something half usable in the end. But with games its pretty much catastrophic when nobody knows, not even the maintainer, what should be finished next and often not even what should be produced in the end, let alone things like style guides, specs about intended triangle count for and object, etc. So the thing isn't so much that they don't want to accept contributions, but simply that they can't, because they have no idea what to do with the contributions or which contributions are needed.

At least thats experince with doing graphics for OpenSource games.

### What would be nice is some sort of site like sourceforge but for creative commons licensed artwork that open source games could make use of.

Yes, such a thing could definitvly be usefull, while not necessary for direct in-game use, it can be quite helpfull to have some 3d models or drawings for inspiration or reference. I once started such a thing, but it never went very far:

http://clanlib.org/~grumbel/mediarepo/show.cgi?new s

For C++, there's always ClanLib. :-)

I've spent a good portion of the last couple of months working on an open source game, and the people who wrote the underlying library (ClanLib) have been extremely helpful in IRC. It's just a matter of finding the right channel.

You don't ----neeeeeeeeed----- MFC, and in fact I would advise you to stay the hell away from it.

Use wxWidgets, or some other framework instead. For fun, why not try something like ClanLib...

MFC is godawful. Once you've tried a few of the other frameworks that allow you to write cross-platform GUI code for Windows, I doubt you'll disagree with me ...

And/Or some of the other interesting OSS API's ...

Your list will get bigger, though you might have to shuffle a few things around.

When linux comes out with a directx equivelent then they might write for it ( this is ONE set of API's ) . Not opengl doesn't count, that is only graphics.

You need sound,graphics,networking,AND graphics card writers writing to those drivers. That is what makes windows such a good gaming platform. Linux needs to consolidate and throw away the 4 graphics libraries and the 3 different sound package blah blah blah blah blah...

Oh darn... wait, you mean something like this? Well, if you don't like that, how about this one? Oh, I see... you forgot to do any research before you made you groundless claim.

Then maybe folks will port apps. If I write a game on linux 7.2 blah blah blah...

"Linux 7.2", huh? Thanks for proving my point that you don't know wtf you're talking about. "Interesting" my ass.

Platform independent code.

There are projects out there that aim to provide a platform-independent method to produce commercial-quality games. There is no real reason that a company has to struggle with long, difficult ports of system-oriented code if they use the platform independent OpenGL (and other libraries) instead.

Now, how do you convince developers (or, more importantly, their managers) of the value of this approach? I don't know, because to a manager market flexibility is just Yet Another Buzzword (TM).

Anyway, as I've stated elsewhere, you're ignoring the fact that Linux does have games. You needn't rely on software ports to attract gamers to Linux (although I will admit that it does make things easier).

• Allegro
• Clanlib
• SDL

SDL seems like it makes it pretty easy to support Linux and Windows

Not only SDL, but also ClanLib and the very widely used Allegro library. Apparently, ClanLib and Allegro have a richer set of features than SDL (such as graphics primitives), but all three SDKs can talk to the various platforms' OpenGL implementations. With tools like these, publisher-developers have little excuse not to write cross-platform code (other than bribes from Microsoft).

the company name is 'convergence integrated media GmbH' or simply 'convergence', NOT 'Digital Convergence', so they're NOT the company who did the infamous (license-wise) :Cue:Cat (this company is called 'Digital:Convergence', btw), but the company who also does the (pretty cool) LinuxTV-drivers for DVB-cards from Siemens/Hauppauge.

the portability issue is softened by direct support of DirectFB as backend by ClanLib, GTK 2.0+ and even SDL (from not-yet-released version 1.2.3 on, get it from CVS), so basically writing code for one of these will give you portability beyond Linux. GGI supports it as well, but not the way it was intended (they're just re-using the binary drivers with their own API).

while replacing X might be something you COULD do with DirectFB (if you'd really want to), code-size and speed seem to be of more concern to the developers, which is quite understandable if you've got settop-boxes in mind. The approach of X is at totally different one, i.e. network-transparent, hardware-independent, portable graphics. DirectFB can simply (additionally and optionally) support the needs of a typical X application/client, so the article was maybe a little bit too anti-X ..

The author of the post, and the person who posted the story, clearly wanted to make a comparison between OpenGL and ALL of DirectX, which as as mentioned before, is ludicrous because of all the stuff OpenGL is lacking.

DirectX does only three things: graphics, sound, and input. OpenGL handles graphics, GLUT handles input, and OpenAL can do sound. Other multimedia programming libraries include Allegro, SDL, and ClanLib, all of which can coexist peacefully with OpenGL graphics.

What kind of game are you working on?

I've been playing with SDL on and off for about a year and a half now. Long ago, I wrote a VisualC-SDL intro, and submitted a bug fix. I've worked on BumpRace, and am working on a game that I plan to port from ClanLib to SDL soon, just to chop the dependencies down and ditch C++.

It sounds like you are talking about a home game programming project. If that's the case, then SDL should more than meet your need. In my experience, home game programmers tend to dramatically over-estimate their performance needs. Focus more on making your game do something interesting first.

I don't meant to say SDL doesn't perform well; Hyperion ported Shogo to Linux using SDL (so, yes, companies other than Loki commercially using it), and Loki ported Tribes 2 and a zillion other games to Linux with SDL...

As for the user community for SDL; it's huge, and quite friendly. There are a lot of projects out there that build on SDL, and there are bindings for Python, Perl, and many other languages. (For casual readers: SDL itself is in C.)

I really don't know what more you could ask for, except for it to become the world standard and have a dedicated hotline for support (DirectX). Other than that, it's all pretty much there.

NOT UNTIL LINUX RUNS DIRECTX APPS, and then I will JUMP ONTO LINUX soooo fast

Wine already implements a subset of DirectDraw and DirectInput, enough to run many older (and more imaginative) games. And there are libraries such as Allegro and ClanLib that make porting across Windows (DirectX) and Linux (X11/DGA) a matter of a recompile.

• SDL, or Simple Direct-media Layer - this is low-level games api
• Clan-Lib - this provides a higher-level API

All it probably* does is treat both CR and LF as line-ending whitespace (line-ending in order to recognize a trailing backslash character; otherwise the position of whitespace is not that important, as long as various tokens are properly separated), and compile normally.

* Of course, this is all just my best guess, since I haven't taken a real look at the actual code of GCC, nor talked with its designers or implementors. So maybe they actually use some magic formula with an all-powerful AI to recognize CR/LF combos, but I'm probably pretty close with the previous hypothesis. But for all I know, I certainly could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that CR+LF is a horrible DOS-ism that hearkens back to TeleTYpe days.

Incidentally, interesting looking game(s) you've got there... gawdz I miss Allegro, although right now I'm in between game SDKs (leaning toward SDL, although also wishing that ClanLib would get their act together and "officially" update their docs and API. But I digress... :)

--
while ( !universe->perfect() ) {
hack (reality);

The only missing glue is the input API. Perasonally, I wouldn't mind it if SDL became standard. It works on almost everything now.

I agree that SDL would be a nice solution to the common API problem. Why? IMHO because it is and it aims to be be cross-platform. I think that Linux (and other unices) need to have some common API with Windows to ease the development of games to many platform at once. We can't (yet) even dream of a situation where leading-edge games were developed primarily on Linux - now it helps to have some common API with Windows.

There are alternatives, too. I can recall Allegro and Clanlib right now.

The above post should be read to the tune of Baz Lehrman's "Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen" speech.

Insightful, yes, funny, but when you're 11, you shouldn't be reading on /. all day. Go out and program! Write your own version of Pac-Man, complete with homing missiles, explosions, and profuse gore.

(Rant: )

Once you start on Slashdot, there's no going back. You start getting Karma, then you start craving more. First you post stuff that's insightful, maybe informative... after a while it trickles down to a few points of "interesting" here and there. "5"'s become rarer and rarer, then you do the unthinkable.

You resort to humor. All out "hope they don't think this is a troll", karma-whoring humor, the kind that only flies on Slashdot.

And before you know it, Slashdot is your browser's home page, and it starts taking up all of your free time. All of a sudden, there's precious little time to program, and you can forget about keeping your pretty GPA above C-level :-).

I broke 90 today. Karma that is. Weeks ago I've stopped reading /. all the time, but the Karma keeps pouring in. I feel dirty. I'm a karma whore. I've only been on this frickin' forum since November, and I'm at 90+ karma. I could troll all day and all night for a week and still post at (Score: 2) by default.

I've moderated 6 times, mostly on weeks when I was too busy to post.

People think I'm funny, insightful, interesting (and overrated, but those moderators suck! ;).

These are presumably rational adults, and I'm not even 18!

It's with this in mind, that I've decided to take a vacation from Slashdot. That means checking /. no more than three times a day. Three shall be the number of the checkings, and the number of the checkings shall be three. Check thou not 4, neither check thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out!

Okay... sorry, just letting off steam.

And that also counts checking my "User Info" to see how much Karma I've gotten. Honestly, the stuff's pretty much useless once you reach 25, and can post at Score: 2. Of course, it's always nice to have some padding in case the moderators get bitchy.

And no more than 1 post a day from me, either. Maybe two if I'm on a roll. But that's it, except on days ending in "y". Then three's the limit.

I'm gonna sit down and program, play video games, go with friends to see movies, maybe get a <gasp> j-o-b, and maybe find a like-minded member of the female species to play videogames with, or whatever it is you're supposed to do with the opposite sex.

I'm going to code a decent game or two this summer. Maybe just one if I actually succeed at finding that elusive MOS. (You can bet your ass they don't hang out in chat rooms!)

I'll update my personal web page. Read more books. (An even 50/50 between reference manuals and sci-fi/fantasy novels).

Just as long as I can refrain from posting to Slashdot. Hey, maybe this means that I can finally disable cookies on my browser. (Mozilla's still crashy, even M16, so I can't use it for day to day stuff. M13 was good, though, and I did use that as my main browser for a time.)

Maybe I'll even update my Sourceforge project.

Whatever I do, I've just got to stay clear of this forum... it's addictive. As one reader's sig says, "I miss my free time, Rob". I agree so wholeheartedly it's not even +1, funny anymore.

I do have a suggestion, though. Weight the karma based on the posts you're trying to achieve.

If you think too many people are clowning around, make a "funny" post worth .5 karma and an "informative" post worth 1.5. If you think it's getting to dry, post a silly story and reverse the above. Change it around, but keep posters aware of the current settings.

And get rid of that damned "overrated" markdown. Moderators should be given better tools than "overrated" to articulate exactly what is wrong with that post.

Finally, kudos to the best change I've seen in /., that is the change of the default threshold from 0 to 1. ACs (and, yes I'm being hypocritical right now, but bear with me) keep getting lamer all the time.

So, I'm out of here for a while... tomorrow I'm going with a group of close friends (some of whom are actually, Females, to see Titan A.E., regardless of what Jon Katz may think of it [IMO, Katz himself is proof that just because someone bashes something/someone, it doesn't mean that they deserve that criticism.] Jon, kudos for Hellmouth and Geeks, both of which I strongly identified with. Keep cranking out stuff like that, and leave movie reviews to videogame-playing, anime junkie coder types like CmdrTaco :-).

And a big kudos to the Geeks In Space. Love the show (and no, I'm not taking a vacation from listening to GiS! Crank out that episode 31!)

Ahh... in the morning I get to decide whether to use SDL, Clanlib, or GGI for my game. So many choices, so little time. And, of course, it'll be GPL'ed so all y'all can enjoy it :-).

Good night, Slashdot. See you less often, for the time being.

But please don't take it personally. (It's not you, it's just me... I think I need more space... it's too much of a commitment... can't we just be friends? ;-)

Feel free to moderate me into oblivion, or to leave it at the default AC score of 0. It really makes little difference to me, and honestly the impact you'd be making either way is negligible. Nobody reads at zero anyway, unless they want to see posts like this one.

Perhaps we need to get rid of "topics" as they're known, and have a giant message board for all stories. That could get interesting.

Your poster geek-in-training, the kind who's going to keep free software alive as the old demigods fall off the 'Net... signing off.

DRI and SDL are only now becoming viable. I know practically nothing about OGL and DX, but if the rumours and supposition on slashdot is right, OpenGL is losing ground to DX. ... Developing for multiple platforms at the same time is overhead. This might not be a good idea unless the game is a guaranteed success - or your market is large enough that N idiots will buy it.

I haven't used SDL but I know a lot of people are using it to make games including Loki which is actually producing full commercial games. From what I understand, it is fairly low level and is pretty good for porting existing games from Windows to Linux.

For a while I have been programming on an API called ClanLib. It is higher level than SDL and is more like a Game SDK. I like the fact that as long as you go through ClanLib (and/or any other cross platform system calls) you can recompile the same program and it will run on top of Direct[Draw,Input,Sound,etc.] in Windows, or several possible targets on Linux (including X of course).

• Linux, Windows and BeOS.
• Basic 2D display.
  Includes primitive drawing (pixels, lines and rects) and images drawing (surfaces/sprites).
• Basic Sound support.
  ClanLib can play static samples and streamed samples, cd audio support, playback session management...
• Basic Input support.
  Keyboard, mouse and joysticks.
• Basic Network support.
  ClanLib provides a easy-to-use, but powerful interface to do game networking.
• Basic 3D support.
  ClanLib fully integrates with OpenGL. Use GL for 3D, and ClanLib for the rest...

I checked out clanlib a while back, saw some interesting stuff there. I just wonder why no one else seems to know there's an open source version of this kind of project that has been in the works already for quite some time...

Though it's still under heavy development, ClanLib (http://clanlib.org) is fairly groovy for making games. It's LGPL'd and can be used as both a low-level and high-level game development library. I've used it in making my game ClanMecha (http://clanmecha.sourceforge.net), and find it to be quite satisfactory.

Can anybody comment(guess) on how much it adds to dev time to do a port/do 2 OSes on avg?

They are thin, wrapper libraries that allow "cross-platform" development. They both appear to be relatively easy to use and offer differing feature sets (Different percieved needs for games development...). Give them a look-see and maybe you'll find what you're looking for.

URLs:

SDL - http://www.devolution.com/ ~slouken/projects/SDL/index.html
ClanLib - http://www.clanlib.org/

Keep in mind that these aren't your only options, there are others in varying levels of usefulness but these are the current front-runners that appear to be sticking out of the crowd (Cross-ELF/JUGL is one of the other libraries, allowing a unique ability- one main binary set for DOS, Windows, and X11 with a batch file to execute the loader engine for each platform. The main drawback to it is that it's poorly documented and fairly primitive.)

ClanLib is one gaming API. I haven't gotten to deep into it, but it looks promising. As with many OpenSource projects, the documentation on their web page is a bit lacking. They have the functions, but usually no description or only a few words on it; a tutorial or two using the functions would be handy.

I start a week of vacation this week, I may just have to help them out with that.

Clanlib is an open source, crossplatform game SDK with a very active developer community.

This is nitpicking, I know; sorry.

But Brian Paul has asked that it not be referred to as "MesaGL". It is the "Mesa graphics library" or "Mesa 3D library". It is OpenGL-compatible, but it is NOT a licensed implementation of OpenGL, which is why, I believe, he prefers people to not use "GL" with it.

Mesa is not all that similar to DirectX. Mesa is similar perhaps to a combination of DirectDraw and Direct3D (which are large parts of DirectX.) Mesa (and OpenGL) are much cleaner and better designed and more efficient. Direct3D has more features, although is a horrible nightmare to program. OpenGL is lower-level .. it is more similar to the immediate mode portion of Direct3D only. People also seem to forget that OpenGL is a 2D graphics lib as well.

I would hate to see DirectX on linux. DirectX is, techically, a total horrific kludge; and ONLY Microsoft could ever have gotten away with forcing something so awful down the throats of developers, hardware vendors and consumers. The linux world should be able to come up with a much cleaner design, but it is going slowly - there is not enough support.

Promising libs:

Clanlib (http://www.clanlib.org/.)

GGI (http://www.ggi-project.org/.)

PenguinPlay games SDK (http://sunsite.auc.dk/penguinplay/.) (This is the closest equivalent to DirectX in the free software world.)

To any developers out there with a bit of spare time, please support these projects!! Either directly, or write apps for them!

It would be ideal if we could see some major software vendor (with a commercial interest in seeing a decent cross-platform API which could be used to make games for Linux and Windows) could lend some full-time developers to one of these projects, such as PenguinPlay SDK and/or GGI.