We now have a German translation of "SDL Tutorial Basics" thanks to Nicolas. You'll find flag icons at the top of the page to switch which Language you are reading. Thanks!

Or click here: German Version of SDL Tutorial Basics

And the winner for the Spring Contest 2012 is...

It's that time now to pick the best game. Remember not to only look at game play, but also the source code.

It's that time again boys and girls. This time I decided to do something a bit different. Instead of trying to clone a specific game or develop a game for a specific genre, I will give you a theme and everyone can choose what sort of game to create based off of that theme (thanks Aaru for the idea). The time frame for this contest is much shorter than previous contests. Better get crackin'. Rules past the break.

Some updates to SDL came out last week. Official announcements past the break.

OpenGL handles the drawing of models in a window but it does not provide the window, or handle events; that is why SDL is required. The prime purpose of this tutorial is to set up the SDL window and events mechanism. It also sets up the OpenGL environment that uses the window, the game loop, and a rotating cube.

Your program is being a CPU hog! In some cases, this situation can actually make your program run slowly! Your code needs to give some time back to the OS (i.e. delay or sleep). Use SDL_Delay(Uint32), where the Uint32 is in milliseconds. As a quick fix, you can toss a SDL_Delay(1) call into your loop. That will give up some amount of time, based on the OS and the resolution of SDL_Delay(), which is somewhere around 10ms. If you need better resolution than that, you have to store the time it takes to perform SDL_Delay(1), check that against delay calls, and then burn the rest of the time in an empty loop. Here's a link to some code implementing that.

The impetus was and still is to build a game. Originally I looked into existing game engines, but it became rapidly apparent the amount of learning required to use them effectively was hardly going to be less than starting from scratch from an OpenGL and SDL base. Furthermore, the use of shaders should be primary and understanding them crucial. I have been creating tutorials as the game engine progresses and offer them here, partly because the writing of them helps me figure stuff out, partly because I have always agreed with NEHE philosophy on matter of making information available, and partly because I have a tendency to lose stuff and if the information is online I can always repatriate it. I hope they are helpful.

Hey everybody, today Mike and I are launching a new website to help you all out with game design! Who is Mike? Mike is an awesome co-worker of mine that has studied game design for years, taught it, and now wants to help the internet community. Hopefully this new site will be useful resource for all your game developers out there.

You can check out more details here

In this muchly desired side tutorial we are going to look at how to implement something most commonly called Game States (or as I call them, App States). This tutorial will be based upon the code from the SDL Collision Events tutorial.

To simply explain what an app state is, try to think of your game (or application) as a parent with many child applications. In other words, your primary application can yield control to a single child when needed.