Game Development Libraries/Engines
Hello, I just want to see what people would suggest as to what libraries and/or game engines are good/helpful for game development, regardless of 2D and 3D game development.
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Usual recommendation are SDL, SFML, Allegro, OpenGL, DirectX, Blender3D, and Ogre 3D (just from the top of my head.
The Unreal engine gets my recommendation as it's (relatively) cheap and provides source code, Unity is also very popular amongst the indie scene. In the open source and free worlds there's the rather artsy Cinder and OpenFrameworks. For 2D you could try LOVE. If you want to get a bit more low level then there's frameworks like SDL and SFML.
I second Lachlan on Unreal Engine 4 (C++) which provides the engine for a quite cheap monthly fee. You can also still keep the engine and source code if you cancel your subscription but you will no longer be able to receive their updates/bugfixes to the engine which they have been providing very rapidly so far. It is very user friendly to use and has a amazing visual scripting aspect (Blueprints) which allow you to easily script game features without digging into code if you don't want to.
Another neat aspect of it is you get access to the source code of the new Unreal Tournament game that they are building along with the community. Which is great if you are a fan of the series or just want to see how professional industry games are built. You can also contribute to the project if you want to.
Then there is Unity which is coming out with a new version of their engine (C# though) and it looks quite good actually.
Those would be my 2 recommendations.
Another neat aspect of it is you get access to the source code of the new Unreal Tournament game that they are building along with the community. Which is great if you are a fan of the series or just want to see how professional industry games are built. You can also contribute to the project if you want to.
Then there is Unity which is coming out with a new version of their engine (C# though) and it looks quite good actually.
Those would be my 2 recommendations.
If you're looking for a simple game to make, pure SFML is a great choice. Other than that I like to use SFML and ModernOpenGL to write graphical programs/simulations
These are all nice suggestions! I made this post to see if there is any other libraries I never heard of that I could possibly add to library-list.
Contrary to popular belief, SDL or SFML isn't ideal for drawing with. They are good frameworks to build an egine around though. They both do context creation, handle sound well, and handle windowing/input in a cross-platform manner. They also provide decent mechanisms for exposing underlying platform handles for things that can't be abstracted (such as window parenting).
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Well, I somewhat retract my statement. It depends on needs. If blitting is all you really need, then cool. Textures and blitting in SDL are done over OpenGL/DirectX anyways.
However, there are various things that you can't do with SDL. Lack of shaders and batch draw commands just to name two big ones out of probably dozens. There's a lack of both feature and performance, for the sake of severe simplicity. If you're making anything more graphical than a Tetris game, I would probably recommend using a renderer or OpenGL.
However, there are various things that you can't do with SDL. Lack of shaders and batch draw commands just to name two big ones out of probably dozens. There's a lack of both feature and performance, for the sake of severe simplicity. If you're making anything more graphical than a Tetris game, I would probably recommend using a renderer or OpenGL.
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