After seven months of development, the release of SDL 2.30.0 (Simple DirectMedia Layer) has been published, aimed at simplifying the development of games and multimedia applications. The SDL library provides features such as hardware-accelerated output of 2D and 3D graphics, input handling, sound playback, 3D output via OpenGL/OpenGL ES/Vulkan, and many other supporting operations. The library is written in C and is distributed under the Zlib license. Necessary bindings are provided for using SDL’s capabilities in projects across various programming languages.
The SDL 2.30.0 release primarily includes bug fixes, as the SDL 2.x branch was transitioned to maintenance mode last year, with active development recently focused on preparing the SDL 3 branch and the sdl2-compat compatibility layer that implements the SDL 2.x API on top of SDL 3, which allows programs written for SDL 2 to utilize the features of the SDL 3 branch.
In the SDL 3 branch, some subsystems have been overhauled, breaking changes have been introduced to the API, and a significant cleanup of outdated features has been conducted, which are no longer relevant in modern contexts. For instance, SDL 3 anticipates a complete rewrite of the audio handling code, default usage of Wayland and PipeWire, cessation of support for OpenGL ES 1.0 and DirectFB, and removal of code for obsolete platforms such as QNX, Pandora, WinRT, and OS/2.
Among the changes in the SDL 2.30.0 release:
- Support for surface formats with indexed palettes and 2 bits per pixel representation has been added.
- The function SDL_GameControllerGetSteamHandle() has been added to obtain the controller descriptor in the Steam API.
- An event SDL_CONTROLLERSTEAMHANDLEUPDATED has been added, which is generated when the controller descriptor in the Steam API changes.
- An environment variable SDL_LOGGING has been added to control log output.
- For macOS, the hints SDL_HINT_JOYSTICK_IOKIT, SDL_HINT_JOYSTICK_MFI, and SDL_HINT_RENDER_METAL_PREFER_LOW_POWER_DEVICE have been implemented.
- For the Xbox platform, the function SDL_GDKGetDefaultUser() has been added.
Source: opennet.ru
