Topic: Graphics Library

SDL was about the only one that was already around 15 years ago. I think the choice for SDL was a good one - Sam Lantinga is a great guy and was already back then a very experienced game engineer - having started (I think) loki games and having worked at blizzard on starcraft and warcraft 3. SDL also reasonably kept up with the times - the transition to accelerated graphics in SDL2 was well done and it now runs on all the mobile platforms too which is a great boon.

That said, SDL is fairly low level - it provides cross platform abstractions that you can build any design on. You will end up writing your own GL pipeline and probably your own render system/scene graph. Sound support is basically some timing guarantees and a sound buffer you can write in. If you want to get a game up and running quickly, I would suggest using a higher level library abstraction. One that I really like these days is piston which I would be interested in trying out for a while.

Of course there is also something like ogre - which seems to me aging poorly though (just a fleeting look at it, no real experience here) or commercial solutions like Unity. Those give you a lot: a scene graph that makes showing something easy, physics and sound effect integrated into your 3d world already. You can whip together a prototype game with these in a weekend - but the learning curve is probably pretty steep.

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Are you or have you been using any ready packages for Wideland's GUI operations?

We rolled our own: you find it in src/ui_basic.

For Audio we only use SDL and SDL_mixer. I consider SDL_mixer as elementary and part of SDL. This is also true for SDL_image and SDL_ttf. The others can be useful, but are not as down to the metal.

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