Notices by Ryan C. Gordon (icculus@mastodon.gamedev.place)

Also, SDL3 now supports MS-DOS. Not even kidding. https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/15377

The Steam Frame probably has to be an ARM processor, because you don’t want to have to wonder about space and price constraints with an x86-64, and whether an eyeball makes a good heat sink.

And it probably doesn’t matter much, but that’s one less thing to worry about when porting from the Oculus Quest.

But unlike Proton’s Faustian bargain (the catalog all works! …why port at all?), in VR, the user tends to convert low framerate into vomit, so a real native port could be _crucial_.

That’s not to imply FEX won’t be amazing at its job…I’m sure it will be. But it can’t break the laws of physics, y’know?

Something I wanted in SDL3 for a long time just landed; you can make the SDL window just take up the whole browser window in Emscripten now.

So instead of this:

https://icculus.org/~icculus/emscripten/testsprite-filldoc/testsprite.html

You can do this:

https://icculus.org/~icculus/emscripten/testsprite-filldoc/testsprite.html?SDL_EMSCRIPTEN_FILL_DOCUMENT=1

Feels more friendly to browser games.

"...but more than that, I hope it is a joy to use. That's the actual thing all libraries should run towards. It's the only feature that matters, really." https://www.patreon.com/posts/project-sdl3-138034434

@a1ba We used SDL 3.0 and 3.1 for development releases. 3.2.0 is the first stable version.

SDL3 is officially released! https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/releases/tag/release-3.2.0

As of about 15 minutes ago, SDL3 reached 100% documentation coverage. Every single public symbol in SDL's headers is now documented!

The massive list is here:

https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/CategoryAPI

The much more pleasant way to browse this is here, though:

https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/APIByCategory

(You can also download the entire wiki as static HTML pages for offline viewing, or even peruse them as Unix manpages. We're taking documentation very seriously in SDL3!)

@toonie I hadn’t played with io_uring/IoRing before the SDL work, but wow, they are just a quantum leap over the previously existing options!

A couple of SDL3 quickies, for some cool new features that just landed! https://www.patreon.com/posts/couple-of-sdl3-117795206

If you liked the Quake 3 video, this one goes into more detail about new and advanced SDL3 features! Porting DirkSimple from SDL2 to SDL3: https://youtu.be/V_MWXDr3Nu4

@psykose it works! And if it doesn’t, we consider it a bug to be fixed.

We have binaries for Loki games from 1999 working this way. :)

There is a massive document on everything you need to migrate from SDL2. It covers literally every symbol that changed from SDL2 to SDL3.

https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/README/migration

And I plan to do some YouTube videos to show how to migrate your game. It took me about an hour of poking around to get ioquake3 ported last night, I'm going to do it from scratch tomorrow and record it, explaining the details as I go. Stay tuned. :)

Besides, don't you want to play with some of these new toys?

https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/NewFeatures

@Conan_Kudo It's ready, too! We built it in parallel from the start this time. :)

https://github.com/libsdl-org/sdl2-compat

@vv221 @Conan_Kudo We learned a lot from sdl12-compat, among the lessons was that it was useful to a much wider audience than we expected--not just hacker hobbyist types, but literally entire Linux distros--and also that waiting years to start it was a massive mistake, because we had to figure out incompatibilities as we worked on it.

For sdl2-compat, whenever we broke compat in SDL3, we had to make a matching commit in the compat library to deal with it.

Smartest thing we ever did.

@dalias Getting a comment like this from the musl maintainer is like the most flattering compliment I've gotten in a long time. :)

SDL3 has hit ABI lock!

You can now trust the interfaces to stay stable. We will _add_ but not _remove_ or _change_ what's there, so it's safe to migrate your game to it!

https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/releases/tag/preview-3.1.3

We're rushing to an official release from here, but what's there has been battle-hardened in Steam and DOTA2 and CS2 for over a year now, across several platforms.

Don't care about the new toys but want your SDL2 program to have the power of SDL3? We built sdl2-compat in parallel with SDL3, so you can just drop a build into your app and go:

https://github.com/libsdl-org/sdl2-compat

@olafurw I'm both honored and deeply humiliated that a lot of these comments are from me, from the original Linux port I did at Loki Software.

The _exit() is there specifically because C++ game code back in the day was loaded with static destructors that usually only did two things: deallocate memory, and crash. Since one was unnecessary and the other disastrous, we'd clean up just the crucial pieces and _exit() at the end to kill the process without running them.