Slashdot Mirror
Open Source C++ ClanLib SDK Refreshed For 2015
New submitter rombust writes: Will ClanLib turn around the tides and finally challenge SDL? The latest 4.0 release already offers what Unity and the Unreal Engine charges 30% for, but now after 16 years of development, using only hobbyist developers, it will take on the giant of open source game SDKs! Dedication that's rarely found in the Open Source community without commercial backing.
Where is this 30 percent figure coming from?
Unreal charges a 5% royalty. Unity charges a flat fee with no royalty.
I remember years and years ago when this first came out it was party to some of the worst looking games of all time. But bad games can be made on any platform, I'm sure someone could have made something good by now. Their website doesn't list any projects that use the library, which is very troubling. They haven't been just developing the library for their own sake for 16 years have they? Someone must be using it.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
Will ClanLib turn around the tides and finally challenge SDL?
No.
It's because the summary was written by the ClanLib developer who is trying to shill his product.
But...but...they were mentioned in an 8-year-old book on C++ game programming. Unity and Unreal better be quaking in their boots!
I developed a complete game using ClanLib, 14 years ago. ClanLib was a nice library (just a library, nothing remotely similar to Unity), but then I had to switch to SDL because they kept changing the API and data structures. It also had serious performance problems, until they decided to switch to SDL and OpenGL as graphical backends.
So I was like... "Should I write an abstraction over ClanLib to save my game from their changes... using a library that is *itself* an abstraction over SDL... or should I just switch to SDL?"
A lone indie developer can either develop his game OR rewrite it every time Clanlib developers think they must break other people's code.