SDL renderer backend #920

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1. lethal-guitar commented on Mar 22, 2024

   

   lethal-guitar

   on Mar 22, 2024

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   Hi, nice, that'd be really cool to see it running on a Wii 🙂 It would indeed be great to have the option for solely SDL-based rendering for increased portability. It's not quite as straightforward as it may seem at first though:

   I had a look at the renderer.hpp file, and at first sight I didn't find anything in there that would not be possible to implement using the SDL_Renderer API

   While the majority of the interface could easily be implemented using SDL_Renderer, there are certain special effects (white damage flash for sprites, underwater effect, cloak powerup translucency effect) which need custom shaders. On top of that, map tile rendering uses VBOs for efficiency.

   For reference, see:
   https://github.com/lethal-guitar/RigelEngine/blob/master/src/engine/graphical_effects.cpp
   

   RigelEngine/src/engine/map_renderer.cpp

   Line 132 in 6f76229

   : pRenderer->createVertexBuffer(data.mVertices);

   That being said, there are definitely ways around this. The tile rendering used to be more straightforward earlier in the project, so you could revert that part of the code to before the changes were made (the relevant commit: 3fe48b8).

   As for the special effects, those could also be implemented on the CPU to avoid the need for dedicated shaders.