Simple DirectMedia Layer explained

Simple DirectMedia Layer
Author:Sam Lantinga
Developer:SDL Community
Operating System:Linux (e.g. SteamOS), Windows,,,,[1],, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 2, Haiku, RISC OS 3.5+[2]
Additionally before v2.0.0: e.g. AmigaOS and MorphOS, and consoles (PlayStation, XBox, Wii, etc), Nintendo DS
Programming Language:C
Genre:API
License:zlib License
Before 2.0.0:
GNU LGPL[3]

Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) is a cross-platform software development library designed to provide a hardware abstraction layer for computer multimedia hardware components. Software developers can use it to write high-performance computer games and other multimedia applications that can run on many operating systems such as Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows.[4]

SDL manages video, audio, input devices, threads, shared object loading, networking and timers.[5] For 3D graphics, it can handle an OpenGL, Vulkan,[6] Metal, or Direct3D11 (older Direct3D version 9 is also supported) context. A common misconception is that SDL is a game engine. However, the library is suited to building games directly, or is usable indirectly by engines built on top of it.

The library is internally written in C and possibly, depending on the target platform, C++ or Objective-C, and provides the application programming interface in C, with bindings to other languages available.[7] It is free and open-source software subject to the requirements of the zlib License since version 2.0, and with prior versions subject to the GNU Lesser General Public License. Under the zlib License, SDL 2.0 is freely available for static linking in closed-source projects, unlike SDL 1.2,[8] although it's possible for the user to override the statically linked library with one provided by them.[9] SDL 2.0, released in 2013, was a major departure from previous versions, offering more opportunity for 3D hardware acceleration, but breaking backwards-compatibility, a wrapper library made to translate 1.2 calls to 2.0 was later made available.

SDL is extensively used in the industry in both large and small projects. By 2010, over 700 games, 180 applications, and 120 demos had been posted on the library website.[10]

History

Sam Lantinga created the library, first releasing it in early 1998, while working for Loki Software. He got the idea while porting a Windows application to Macintosh. He then used SDL to port Doom to BeOS (see Doom source ports).[11] Several other free libraries were developed to work alongside SDL, such as SMPEG and OpenAL. He also founded Galaxy Gameworks in 2008 to help commercially support SDL, although the company plans are currently on hold due to time constraints.[12]

Soon after putting Galaxy Gameworks on hold, Lantinga announced that SDL 1.3 (which would then later become SDL 2.0) would be licensed under the zlib License.[13] Lantinga announced SDL 2.0 on 14 July 2012, at the same time announcing that he was joining Valve, the first version of which was announced the same day he joined the company.[14] Lantinga announced the stable release of SDL 2.0.0 on 13 August 2013.[15]

SDL 2.0 is a major update to the SDL 1.2 codebase with a different, not backwards-compatible[16] API. It replaces several parts of the 1.2 API with more general support for multiple input and output options. Some feature additions include multiple window support, hardware-accelerated 2D graphics, and better Unicode support.[17]

Support for Mir and Wayland was added in SDL 2.0.2[18] and enabled by default in SDL 2.0.4.[19] Version 2.0.4 also provided better support for Android.[20]

Software architecture

SDL is a wrapper around the operating-system-specific functions that the game needs to access. The only purpose of SDL is to provide a common framework for accessing these functions for multiple operating systems (cross-platform).[21] SDL provides support for 2D pixel operations, sound, file access, event handling, timing and threading. It is often used to complement OpenGL by setting up the graphical output and providing mouse and keyboard input, since OpenGL comprises only rendering.

A game using the Simple DirectMedia Layer will not automatically run on every operating system; further adaptations must be applied. These are reduced to the minimum, since SDL also contains a few abstraction APIs for frequent functions offered by an operating system.

The syntax of SDL is function-based: all operations done in SDL are done by passing parameters to subroutines (functions). Special structures are also used to store the specific information SDL needs to handle. SDL functions are categorized under several different subsystems.

Subsystems

SDL is divided into several subsystems:[22]

Basics: Initialization and Shutdown, Configuration Variables, Error Handling, Log Handling
  • Video: Display and Window Management, surface functions, rendering acceleration, etc.
  • Input Events: Event handling, Support for Keyboard, Mouse, Joystick and Game controller
  • Force Feedback: SDL_haptic.h implements support for "Force Feedback"
  • Audio: SDL_audio.h implements Audio Device Management, Playing and Recording
  • Threads: multi-threading: Thread Management, Thread Synchronization Primitives, Atomic Operations
  • Timers: Timer Support
  • File Abstraction: Filesystem Paths, File I/O Abstraction
  • Shared Object Support: Shared Object Loading and Function Lookup
  • Platform and CPU Information: Platform Detection, CPU Feature Detection, Byte Order and Byte Swapping, Bit Manipulation
  • Power Management: Power Management Status
  • Additional: Platform-specific functionality

    • Besides this basic, low-level support, there also are a few separate official libraries that provide some more functions. These comprise the "standard library", and are provided on the official website and included in the official documentation:

    Other, non-standard libraries also exist. For example: SDL_Collide on SourceForge created by Amir Taaki.

    Language bindings

    The SDL 2.0 library has language bindings for:

    Supported back-ends

    Because of the way SDL is designed, much of its source code is split into separate modules for each operating system, to make calls to the underlying system. When SDL is compiled, the appropriate modules are selected for the target system. The following back-ends are available:

    An unofficial Sixel back-end is available for SDL 1.2.[51]

    The Rockbox MP3 player firmware also distributes a version of SDL 1.2, which is used to run games such as Quake.[52]

    Reception and adoption

    Over the years SDL was used for many commercial and non-commercial video game projects. For instance, MobyGames listed 120 games using SDL in 2013,[53] and the SDL website itself listed around 700 games in 2012.[54] Important commercial examples are Angry Birds,[55] Unreal Tournament, and games developed using Valve's Source Engine, which uses SDL extensively for cross-platform compatibility; ones from the open-source domain are OpenTTD,[56] The Battle for Wesnoth[57] or Freeciv.[58]

    The cross-platform game releases of the popular Humble Indie Bundles for Linux, Mac and Android are often SDL-based.

    SDL is also often used for later ports on new platforms with legacy code. For instance, the PC game Homeworld was ported to the Pandora handheld[59] and Jagged Alliance 2 for Android[60] via SDL.

    Also, several non video game programs use SDL; examples are the emulators, such as DOSBox, FUSE ZX Spectrum emulator and VisualBoyAdvance.

    There were several books written for development with SDL (see further reading).

    SDL is used in university courses teaching multimedia and computer science, for instance, in a workshop about game programming using libSDL at the University of Cadiz in 2010, or a Game Design discipline at UTFPR (Ponta Grossa campus) in 2015.

    Video game examples using SDL

    Further reading

    Notes and References

    1. Web site: Oh look, we'll have official tvOS support in SDL 2.0.5, for people that want their SDL-based games on Apple TV!. September 15, 2016.
    2. Web site: SDL/docs/README-riscos.md at 9d83c0a65d969a902c91f4f94fd5a904c0828a33 · libsdl-org/SDL . 2024-03-17 . GitHub . en.
    3. Web site: SDL license . 3 March 2014.
    4. Web site: a list of the platforms SDL supports . Libsdl.org . 9 April 2016 . https://web.archive.org/web/20160401091424/http://wiki.libsdl.org/Installation . 2016-04-01.
    5. Web site: SDL official website . Libsdl.org . 19 March 2010.
    6. Web site: CategoryVulkan - SDL Wiki'. wiki.libsdl.org. 2019-05-05.
    7. Web site: SDL Language Bindings . libsdl.org . Simple DirectMedia Layer . 13 August 2014.
    8. Web site: Licensing the Simple DirectMedia Layer library . 30 January 2012.
    9. Web site: SDL/docs/README-dynapi.md at main · libsdl-org/SDL . 2024-06-25 . GitHub . en.
    10. Web site: 2010-06-29. Simple DirectMedia Layer. 2021-08-07. https://web.archive.org/web/20100629004347/http://www.libsdl.org/games.php?order=name&category=-1&completed=0&os=-1&match_name=&perpage=-1. 29 June 2010.
    11. Web site: http://web.archive.org/web/20030511174315/http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-making-linux-fun/. SDL: Making Linux fun. Sam. Lantinga. Sam Lantinga. 1999-09-01. 2023-12-15. 2003-05-11. IBM.
    12. Web site: Exploring the Galaxy . 6 April 2011. 30 January 2012.
    13. http://forums.libsdl.org/viewtopic.php?t=7148 SDL 1.3 to be zLib Licensed
    14. Web site: SDL 2.0 Is Coming Very Soon With New Features . 17 August 2012.
    15. http://forums.libsdl.org/viewtopic.php?p=38569&sid=9efbea827cdebd71ee430cda823bcdc7#38569 Announcing SDL 2.0.0
    16. http://wiki.libsdl.org/moin.cgi/MigrationGuide#Backward-compatibility MigrationGuide - SDL Wiki'
    17. Web site: SDL 1.3 Roadmap. 14 June 2011 . 25 July 2011.
    18. Web site: Some of Linux's Most Popular Games Will Run Natively On Mir . Joey-Elijah . Sneddon . 5 February 2014 . 19 March 2014.
    19. Web site: SDL 2.0.4 Changelog. Sam. Lantinga. 2 January 2016. 6 January 2016.
    20. Web site: SDL_SysWMinfo.
    21. Web site: Introduction to SDL. 3 March 2014.
    22. Web site: APIByCategory.
    23. Web site: SDL_image 2.0 . libsdl.org . 19 July 2014.
    24. Web site: SDL_mixer 2.0 . libsdl.org . 19 July 2014.
    25. Web site: SDL_net 2.0 . libsdl.org . 19 July 2014.
    26. Web site: SDL_ttf 2.0 . libsdl.org . 19 July 2014.
    27. Web site: SDL_rtf 0.1 . libsdl.org . 19 July 2014.
    28. Web site: cl-sdl2. GitHub. 23 November 2017.
    29. Web site: GitHub. f03sdl2. 2019-10-28.
    30. Web site: Gambas Wiki. gb.sdl2. 2023-02-02.
    31. Web site: Go + Julia + Fourier = Open Source Frequon Invaders. Arch D. . Robison. November 9, 2015. software.intel.com. en. 2019-08-02.
    32. Web site: SDL on Hackage.
    33. Web site: SDL2 on Hackage.
    34. Web site: Bieler. Jonathan. jonathanBieler/SimpleDirectMediaLayer.jl. GitHub. 2020-07-30. 2020-08-08.
    35. Web site: SquidSinker. Example games for GameZero.jl. GitHub. 2020-08-02. 2020-08-08.
    36. Web site: Daly. Nathan. Example game written in julia using SDL2. GitHub. 2019-07-31. 2019-08-02.
    37. Web site: SDL2 for Nim. GitHub. 31 May 2022.
    38. Web site: Odin Vendor Library Collection.
    39. Web site: Odin GitHub repository.
    40. Web site: PerlGameDev/SDL. GitHub. 20 February 2019.
    41. Web site: PHP-SDL. GitHub. 2019-10-28.
    42. Web site: SDL2::Raw. modules.raku.org. 15 May 2020.
    43. Book: Beginning Ring Programming - From Novice to Professional Mansour Ayouni Apress. en.
    44. Web site: Using RingLibSDL — Ring 1.16 documentation.
    45. Web site: WhatsNew.txt. 28 September 2020.
    46. Web site: [Commits] SDL: Enable building the Metal renderer by default, and weak lin...]. 7 December 2017.
    47. Web site: SDL: README-platforms.txt@3e2f230a6d62 . Hg.libsdl.org . libsdl.org . 2013-12-08 . https://web.archive.org/web/20131215031050/http://hg.libsdl.org/SDL/file/default/README-platforms.txt . 2013-12-15.
    48. Web site: Using OpenGL With SDL . 2015-07-09 .
    49. Web site: SDL and Wayland.
    50. Web site: Raspberry Pi Support Added To SDL2 Library. Michael. Larabel. 30 September 2013.
    51. Web site: SDL 1.2 Sixel . . 2016-04-09.
    52. Web site: SDLPluginPort . 2019-08-11.
    53. Web site: Middleware: SDL Group Description . Games that use the very portable Simple DirectMedia Layer.. 27 September 2013 . 18 May 2012 . MobyGames.
    54. Web site: Games . 18 May 2012 . 18 May 2012 . libsdl.org . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20100629004347/http://www.libsdl.org/games.php?order=name&category=-1&completed=0&os=-1&match_name=&perpage=-1 . 29 June 2010 . dmy-all .
    55. Web site: SDL Testimonials . Galaxygameworks.com . 1 February 2012. https://web.archive.org/web/20110716163841/http://www.galaxygameworks.com/testimonials.html . 16 July 2011.
    56. Web site: Development . OpenTTD . 19 March 2010.
    57. Web site: CompilingWesnoth . Wesnoth . 27 February 2010 . 19 March 2010.
    58. Web site: SDLClient - Freeciv.org . Freeciv.wikia.com . 19 March 2010.
    59. Web site: Game of the Week #3 – Homeworld SDL . 23 June 2011 . pandorapress.net . 8 May 2012 . may88 . [...] released port of HomeworldSDL. Forum member Edglex enables your Pandora to experience the excellent work done by the guys at HomeworldSDL..
    60. http://www.ja-galaxy-forum.com/board/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=273148&page=1 JA2 Stracciatella Feedback » Jagged Alliance 2 Android Stracciatella Port RC2 Release - please test

    This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Simple DirectMedia Layer".

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