SDL is not a GUI

SDL is not a GUI

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Someone asked about GUI builders for SDL.  As far as I can tell, there's
no such thing out there.  I don't find any references to "SDL GUI
builders" when I search Google, newsgroups, or the SDL mailing list.

It doesn't appear to be a correct notion for SDL.  SDL appears to
provide one window, not GUI components.  People have written various GUI
libraries *on top of* SDL.  I suppose one could hunt and peck through
those to see if one of 'em supports a GUI builder.  But I'll leave that
hunt-and-peck effort to someone else.  If it ain't readily poppin' up on
Google, it probably ain't out there in any prime time usable way.

Thus if you want freeware GUI builders, you should probably go with
Glide because you know about it and it's readily available.

Maybe you could build a GUI with a GUI builder, i.e. .NET or some such,
and then manually make one of your windows a SDL window.  I have no idea
how much effort that would be.  I wouldn't assume it's trivial, because
there can be all sorts of locking, performance, and available features
issues.  Some things are built to work with each other and other things
aren't.

I think it's a safe bet that SDL in and of itself doesn't solve any GUI
problems.  You'd need to identify a higher level library built on SDL,
and there are several out there.  I do not know which one is better for
Xconq, and I'll leave that learning curve to someone else.


Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

Taking risk where others will not.