Ask Sam Lantinga About SDL On PS2 And More

Sam Lantinga is the author and project lead of the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL), which was recently ported amid general acclaim to the Sony PS2. People have been curious about SDL for a long time (it's been around for a while, and used in quite a few games). He's not just a library programmer though; he also designs games (in this case, working with Lauren MacDonell) and thinks hard and lucidly about the intricacies of information display within them. Here's your chance to ask Sam directly what's on your mind about SDL, game design and more. Note -- many questions are answered within the links already given, so hit those first. One question per post, please (but as many posts as you'd like) -- we'll forward the highest-rated questions on to Sam, and post his answers soon after.

Comments

Graphics Hardware Drivers

[m2]

My question is a bit tainted by my personal opinion in this matter, but I'm sure Sam will be able to provide a different (and surely interesting) point of view.

At the risk of being a tad Linux centric, does the availability or unavailability of hardware specifications and technical documentation on graphics hardware affect a Linux game developer and why? With two concrete cases in mind, on one hand NVIDIA who provides binary drivers and "high level" documentation about their cards, and on the other hand, ATI for which there's source code for the drivers with support for half of the features the hardware offers, but neither openly accesible hardware documentation nor much "high level" docs, how do you think this can affect the future development of games for Linux (proprietary or otherwise)?

Thanks

Sony Development Costs

[debrain]

Sony charges stiff fees for Playstation (2) development licenses. Was one of the primary focuses of SDL a way to circumvent these fees, broaden the PS2 platform, broaden the SDL platform, or broaden Linux as a viable game platform?

higher level?

[magic]

With X-Box supporting DirectX only (and a special version at that) and PS2 not supporting OpenGL in general, some of the utility of SDL is lost. For example, I can write a SDL & OpenGL game that compiles and runs on OSX, Linux, and Win32. But window, input, thread and audio management are the least of my problems when moving to X-Box or PS2... I have to rewrite my whole graphics pipeline!

There are, of course, some very good commercial 3D API's that will abstract over this problem. One of the strengths of SDL has been that you have abstracted over the low level and have avoided getting into the sticky business of fighting OpenGL and Direct3D for the 3D API. This also limits the utility of SDL, however, because of the lack of a solid, free API for abstracting the 3D API.

Do you see SDL moving higher up the graphics pipeline in the future, or is it your intent to continue to avoid higher level 3D calls?

-magic

What your status with Loki

[Mr T]

Was your depature good? Daniel Vogel also left. Is Loki in a good position or did you leave because of some problem. What's the deal?

Gamecube, Xbox?

[evilMoogle]

With SDL for PS2, are there any plans to do the same for the other next-gen platforms, the Gamecube and the Xbox?

Blizzard Entertainment

[j7953]

What are you working on at Blizzard? Do you get paid for continuing your work on SDL, or do you have to do that in your spare time?

directx 8 and SDL

[drenehtsral]

From playing with it, and noticing what has been conveniently removed from the documentation (but is still in the libraries), it looks like DirectX 8 is trying very hard to do away with driectdraw and work purely through the 3d engine. Sprites are just 2d textured polys, etc...
This leads me to believe that any future enhancements/optimizations/support/testing/etc... that will happen with directx will be only on the direct3d part, and directdraw is probably going to be unsupported. Do y'all have any plans to deal with that?

End-user availability?

[DeadMeat (TM)]

I brought this up before when the port was announced, but nobody knew the exact answer, so maybe I can get it straight from the horse's mouth . . .

From what I understand, the PS2 Linux distro uses a proprietary, binary-only driver/library/program to allow programmers to access the PS2's graphics chip. My question is, how will this hinder end users' ability to get their hands on SDL-based PS2 games?

Does this mean they'll have to buy a copy of the $200 Linux development kit? Or are developers allowed to freely redistribute the graphics runtimes? (Or have you found some other way around this, perhaps by accessing the PS2 hardware without the binary runtime?)

I'm just afraid that most PS2 gamers (read: non-geeks) won't find SDL games too attractive if they have to buy a $200 Linux kit to play them.