SFML or SDL on a virtual machine

Sep 6, 2012 at 2:56pm
In order to simplify team development of a simple game, I am considering the idea of installing and setting up a development environment in linux on a virtual machine, and distributing copies to each team member.

There could be a few problems however. My only experience with this sort of thing is developing a clutter app on a linux virtual machine. I had to enable intel virtualization technology in bios in order for it to work due to clutter requiring access to hardware with 3D acceleration capability.

Anyways, does SDL or SFML have this kind of dependency? Anyone have any experience with this? In other words, will SDL or SFML run without hardware acceleration?
Sep 6, 2012 at 3:31pm
SDL will run without hardware acceleration. Not sure about SFML. I think not.
Sep 6, 2012 at 3:56pm
As far as I know SFML runs on top of OpenGL, which is hardware dependent.
Sep 6, 2012 at 4:48pm
AFAIK SDL runs on top of DirectX (on Windows -- specificaly DirectDraw), which is also hardware dependent. But maybe it runs on OpenGL since that would help with portability (not to mention it has integration with OpenGL)

Neither SDL nor SFML have to be hardware accellerated. But you'll get crap performance out of each of them unless it's enabled.

If I had to wager I'd guess that SDL would perform better in the absense of hw accelleration, but take that with a grain of salt.
Last edited on Sep 6, 2012 at 4:51pm
Sep 7, 2012 at 3:23am
I guess we'll give SDL a try.
Sep 7, 2012 at 5:24am
Be careful when using SDL for alpha blending in cross-platform code. I've found that the same code in Windows and Linux would produce quite different results when blending two surfaces with alpha channels. I don't remember the specifics, though. I do remember it was so bad I ended up just coding the alpha blending in software myself.
Sep 7, 2012 at 9:55am
SFML is on top of OpenGL and uses hardware acceleration.
SDL uses software renderer.

SFML is written in c++ in an OO manner. (extremely simple and awesome)
SDL is written in c with calling functions and passing objects as parameters.
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