Fixed some rendering bugs, worked around an Allegro bug with video playback. We're cooking soon. Gonna take a break to finish Firestar 1.3 before I continue on the game and then I'm ready to start programming the 2D scene graph.

@bonkmaykr Just out of curiosity, is there any reason why you chose Allegro over SDL or even SFML? I've been aware of it's existence for years, but I've never heard of anyone using it until I noticed you using it.

Follow

@xianc78 I like the simplicity of it (only making a 2D game) and the smaller community, plus it was the earliest option I was aware of. I'll try SDL in the future maybe.

@bonkmaykr I use SFML because I thought that if I'm going to use C++, I might as well use a library written in C++, otherwise I would have to deal with some weird shit like constantly having to convert string objects to C strings when drawing on-screen text.

SFML has some weird quirks that I don't like. For example, most video game/multimedia/graphics libraries allow you to display images on screen by simply loading the image and setting the coordinates, and it's done all in a single function/method. SFML has three classes that are used for displaying images. You need to load the image into an image object, which represents the file itself. Then, you need to load it to a texture object which allows it to be manipulated. And finally, you load it into a sprite object which has a pointer to the texture along with a set of coordinates.

There is also the lack of dynamic z-buffering unless you directly use OpenGL, which I've already talked about previously. Laurent Gomila strictly wants it for 2D games, despite the fact that even most 2D games have some depth effect to them.

In hindsight, maybe I should've chosen Allegro over SFML, but I'm tired of tool hopping. I've used Pygame and MonoGame previously and SFML has the weirdest quirks. It's decent, but it's never going to be nearly as common as SDL.

Sign in to participate in the conversation
Game Liberty Mastodon

Mainly gaming/nerd instance for people who value free speech. Everyone is welcome.