@icedquinn @xianc78 @dqn @lanodan rip

@lanodan @icedquinn @dqn You could probably go a little higher level and use a multimedia framework like SDL or SFML.

I use MonoGame which is basically an open-source implementation of the now discontinued XNA framework. It isn't a full-blown engine because things like level formats, physics, AI, etc still have to be implemented yourself, but it gets a lot of bitch work (such as implementing graphics and audio libraries) done.

@xianc78 @lanodan @dqn considering the grade of games that fill this space there isn't a greatly convincing reason not to just use goodt.

@xianc78 @icedquinn @dqn
I'd rather not, SDL is good but there is few things in it that I'm not sure I would like, it's too much of a framework.

And SFML is a gigantic NOPE for me, no wayland support: https://github.com/SFML/SFML/issues/1082

I would quite recommend GLFW and pretty sure it's the thing I would try first but I'm not sure what are it's pain points.

@xianc78 @dqn @icedquinn Also the reason I'm not much towards something that could support X11 natively is that X11 is a pile of garbage at this point.
There is literally 20+ years of different kind of stuff to support, someone using twm or ratpoison will lack a ton of the recent-ish APIs (ie. EWMH), things like fullscreen+multi-display and mouse grabbing support and sure SDL would provide an abstraction but it needs to be one that works and I've had a bunch of weird issues with it on different window managers.

@lanodan @icedquinn @dqn Yeah. Unfortunately, most game programmers are just focusing on getting their game done and not focusing on shit like supporting different window managers. They probably assume that anyone running their games on Linux would probably be using something like Ubuntu.

@xianc78 @lanodan @dqn tbh we don't care about linux and all of those dumbass problems are for you guys to figure out and its only supported by the grace of renpy providing it for free

@icedquinn @dqn @lanodan Ren'Py is build ontop of Pygame which I used before and last time I checked Pygame was a mountain of duck tape just to support all these platforms and this is a Python library we're talking about.

@xianc78 @dqn @lanodan yes but the point is as a game developer i literally don't care about what dumbass thing devault did or nvidia didn't do i care about moving jpegs of tiddies and getting fiat bucks at the end of the month.

@icedquinn @dqn @xianc78 Well tbh I think game devs should more use framework things like renpy, löve, …
Or outright target retro gaming platforms like the NES.

@lanodan @dqn @xianc78 most of them are written in twine or renpy. one or two crazy folk (the guy who did Strive for Power, and the i think enby who did Hardcoded) used Godot.

some chucklefucks used Unity but tbh they used Fungus and unity was an implementation detail.

@lanodan @dqn @xianc78 once many years ago i had made a very teeny clone of renpy using lua and sdl. it never went anywhere but it was *very* smol.

@icedquinn @dqn @xianc78 Problem of things like Unity is that it's a whole stack of weird stuff, like it seems to be using SDL instead of a more low-level thing like GLFW or glbinding.
And it's proprietary so it can't be patched to fix interoperability bugs.

At least this means that Unity games for me work via wayland (they often didn't in Xorg+XMonad), at least with using SDL_DYNAMIC_API to point to my distro's build of SDL.

@xianc78 @icedquinn @dqn Yeah, meanwhile if I release a game the number of people using Ubuntu in my direct audience is quite low, it's going to be a lot of Gentoo, Arch, Alpine, Debian, some BSDs, …