I finally got rid of the last legacy software library that I have in The Ditty of Carmeana. The Demo came with a whole slew of open source code that I built off, but it turns out some of them (namely Pango, Cal3D, and PyGame) turned out to be not-so-great decisions.
Cal3D, an open source library to deform models, was the first to go; the vertex shader took over that job. Next came Pango, which I was using for paragraph layout. It is probably the most awful, evil, and saddistic library in existence. I wrote my own layout code on top of Freetype to get rid of that pestilence.
Now I am rid of PyGame. PyGame was actually not so bad, and I’d defintely recommend it for less ambitious games, but eventually my game just outclassed it and I needed something better. Problem is, it’s built on top of another library called SDL, and SDL is good at getting a window open and graphics on the screen, and nothing else. Things like input, operating system and window interaction, and innocuous things handling like screen resizing, are not handled very well in SDL and therefore not in PyGame either. One of my big goals (and one of the reasons people playing the game in Twitch don’t bang their heads on a desk) is for the game to not do insane things like crashing or going blank when you try to resize the window. SDL made that difficult, and I’m not sure I ever managed to work around all those issues.
Now I’ve relaced it with GLFW, which is smooth and sleek, and does all the little things right. It’s also really easy to hack, which is nice because it’s missing a few features (like joystick event callbacks) and had a couple bugs, but overall it’s just a breath of fresh air compared to SDL.
So at last, the Ditty of Carmeana is free of old decisions I now regret, at least on the coding side.
(And yes, I did actually say that my game outclassed something.)
