Re: Input Library

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Katie Lucas wrote:

> You know everytime anyone asks this question, people go "SDL
> works". When I point out it doesn't on any of my systems, we get into
> a whole debate about how it must do, and therefore still no-one's
> actually explained to me how come the out-of-the-box installation's
> program that's supposed to make link lines to go in the makefile
> doesn't work (it misses out loads of the X11 link commands). Then
> there's a whole argument about linux library versioning and how the
> SDL team don't understand how it's supposed to work, and twice now
> this has happened, and SDL doesn't work on any one of the recent
> versions of RedHat I've installed on various machines here. The best
> anyone could get was "probably easiest to delete the whole
> installation and go get the latest one and build it from source"

I agree that the whole version management thing is a major problem
with SDL...gazillions of separate components - all at different
version numbers - all released on different dates with different
cross-dependancies.  It's horrible.

> As a result, personally, I use GLUT, and joysticks can go hang.

GLUT does actually support a single joystick - but not on all platforms
and it only knows about two axis sticks with (IIRC) four buttons.

My PLIB library collection has a portable joystick handler that
works with GLUT - and allows arbitary numbers of joysticks with
any number of analog axes and buttons.

So a combination of GLUT+PLIB gets you everything you need and
has the nice spinoff that resulting programs are very portable
out-of-the-box.

----------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------------
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