All the code for this post can be found here and downloaded via version control using bzr
SDL.h
The first thing we need to do when using SDL is to include the SDL.h header file. This is done using the following line
#include <SDL/SDL.h>Note that the directory prefix SDL/ is part of this path, as we shall see later the sdl-config script will give us the correct include paths when we compile the program relative to this directory.
SDL_main
Depending upon the operating system, SDL uses different native code to generate the window / interactions with the operating system. Under linux this is done be default, however under Mac OSX and Windows we need to include a different version of main. To allow this and make the code portable we can use the C/C++ conditional compilation pre-processor. To do this we use the following code
/// note that under mac osx (and windows) there is a different /// way to build SDL so we need to use SDL_main under linux /// normal main is fine so we use this conditional compilation /// to incude the correct version (DARWIN being mac os x) #if defined (DARWIN) || defined (WIN32) int SDL_main(int argc, char **argv) #else int main(int argc, char **argv) #endif
SDL_Init
The first thing we need to do when using SDL is to initialise the library, to do this we use the SDL_Init function, this is passed one parameter which is a flag to indicate which sub-systems should be initialised. These values are combined together using a logical or ( | ). The subsystems available are as follows
| SDL_INIT_TIMER | Initializes the timer sub system. |
| SDL_INIT_AUDIO | Initializes the audio sub system. |
| SDL_INIT_VIDEO | Initializes the video sub system. |
| SDL_INIT_CDROM | Initializes the cdrom sub system. |
| SDL_INIT_JOYSTICK | Initializes the joystick sub system. |
| SDL_INIT_EVERYTHING | Initialize all of the above. |
| SDL_INIT_NOPARACHUTE | Prevents SDL from catching fatal signals. |
| SDL_INIT_EVENTTHREAD |
SDL_Init( SDL_INIT_VIDEO | SDL_INIT_JOYSTICK);In the following examples we will use just the video subsystem but we will also check to see if the initialisation actually worked by checking the return value from SDL_init and making sure it's a zero
if (SDL_Init( SDL_INIT_VIDEO ) !=0)
{
std::cerr <<"error initialising SDL exiting\n";
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
Setting Video mode
To give us a video surface we use the SDL_SetVideoMode function, it has 4 parameters width and height, bits per pixel (bpp) and flags.
If the bpp value is set to 0 it will attempt to use the system value for the current display, the flags parameter can be a logical or combination of the values below, however some of these flags will cancel each other out.
If the bpp value is set to 0 it will attempt to use the system value for the current display, the flags parameter can be a logical or combination of the values below, however some of these flags will cancel each other out.
| SDL_SWSURFACE | Surface is stored in system memory |
| SDL_HWSURFACE | Surface is stored in video memory |
| SDL_ASYNCBLIT | Surface uses asynchronous blits if possible |
| SDL_ANYFORMAT | Allows any pixel-format (Display surface) |
| SDL_HWPALETTE | Surface has exclusive palette |
| SDL_DOUBLEBUF | Surface is double buffered (Display surface) |
| SDL_FULLSCREEN | Surface is full screen (Display Surface) |
| SDL_OPENGL | Surface has an OpenGL context (Display Surface) |
| SDL_OPENGLBLIT | Surface supports OpenGL blitting (Display Surface) |
| SDL_RESIZABLE | Surface is resizable (Display Surface) |
| SDL_HWACCEL | Surface blit uses hardware acceleration |
| SDL_SRCCOLORKEY | Surface use colorkey blitting |
| SDL_RLEACCEL | Colorkey blitting is accelerated with RLE |
| SDL_SRCALPHA | Surface blit uses alpha blending |
| SDL_PREALLOC | Surface uses preallocated memory |
This function will return an SDL_Surface structure if successful which will be referred to in other drawing functions. If this fails NULL will be returned to we can check if there was an error.
/// @brief the width of the window
const int WINDOW_WIDTH = 1024;
/// @brief the height of the window
const int WINDOW_HEIGHT = 720;
SDL_Surface* screen = SDL_SetVideoMode( WINDOW_WIDTH, WINDOW_HEIGHT,
0,SDL_HWSURFACE | SDL_DOUBLEBUF );
if( screen == NULL)
{
std::cerr<<"error setting SDL Video Mode\n";
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
In this example we are setting the video to be a Hardware surface (in GPU memory) and to use double buffering which should give use better graphics performance in the later examples.Setting the window caption
To set the text in the titlebar of the window created by SDL we can use the following code
// next we set the window bar caption to the text 2nd param is for an icon // this is a char * to a pixmap data but if we use 0 none is loaded SDL_WM_SetCaption( "A Simple SDL Window", 0 );
Event processing
SDL uses an event structure called SDL_Event to store all the information about the various events the host system / Windows manager is passing. This structure is actually a structure or many other structures and we can process the information in a number of ways. For these first simple examples we are going to look for a key down press and the windows system passing a Quit message. The structure of this is a continuous while loop, where we check a flag to see if we should exit.SDL_Event event;
bool quit=false;
// now we loop until the quit flag is set to true
while(!quit)
{
// process SDL events, in this case we are looking for keys
while ( SDL_PollEvent(&event) )
{
switch (event.type)
{
// this is the window x being clicked.
case SDL_QUIT : quit = true; break;
// now we look for a keydown event
case SDL_KEYDOWN:
{
switch( event.key.keysym.sym )
{
// if it's the escape key quit
case SDLK_ESCAPE : quit = true; break;
default : break;
}
}
default : break;
}
}
} // end processing loop
Exiting SDL
Once processing has finished it is important to shutdown SDL as it may have grabbed resources that other programs need access. To do this we use the SDL_Quit function.
Compiling the program
To compile our completed program we need to pass several flags to the c++ compiler we are using, this is what the sdl-config program is for. If we run sdl-config we get the following
sdl-config --cflags --libs -I/usr/include/SDL -D_GNU_SOURCE=1 -D_REENTRANT -L/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf -lSDLWe can combine this into the call to g++ by using the single back quotes as follows
g++ InitSDL.cpp -o InitSDL `sdl-config --cflags --libs`The full listing of the program can be downloaded from the bzr repository at the top of the page, however here is the source for the basic demo (without comments)
#include <SDL/SDL.h>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <iostream>
const int WINDOW_WIDTH = 1024;
const int WINDOW_HEIGHT = 720;
#if defined (DARWIN) || defined (WIN32)
int SDL_main(int argc, char **argv)
#else
int main(int argc, char **argv)
#endif
{
if (SDL_Init( SDL_INIT_VIDEO ) !=0)
{
std::cerr <<"error initialising SDL exiting\n";
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
SDL_Surface* screen = SDL_SetVideoMode( WINDOW_WIDTH, WINDOW_HEIGHT, 0,SDL_HWSURFACE | SDL_DOUBLEBUF );
if( screen == NULL)
{
std::cerr<<"error setting SDL Video Mode\n";
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
SDL_WM_SetCaption( "A Simple SDL Window", 0 );
SDL_Event event;
bool quit=false;
while(!quit)
{
while ( SDL_PollEvent(&event) )
{
switch (event.type)
{
case SDL_QUIT : quit = true; break;
case SDL_KEYDOWN:
{
switch( event.key.keysym.sym )
{
case SDLK_ESCAPE : quit = true; break;
default : break;
}
}
default : break;
}
}
} // end processing loop
SDL_Quit();
return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}
