GDC presentation on SDL2 to SDL3 migration

poVoq

Seems pretty relevant to some games not still stuck on SDL1.2 😱

TPW

Thanks. Doing my stuff in SDL2 atm, but porting doesn't seem to much of a ruckus.

dulsi

I like the way the developers of SDL work. They are very good at making porting easy. I've tried to stress that to other groups like Godot but was told that it's ok for it to be a lot of work.

TPW

dulsi While I agree it is noteworthy that porting from 1.2 to 2 isn't that trivial. The whole renderer concept SDL2 is built around wasn't present in SDL1.2. As soon as new features are to be introduced keeping things compatible gets difficult.Maybe this is the problem of Godot?

dulsi

TPW Yes 1.2 to 2 wasn't trivial but they had a detailed guide for doing the change and they did create the sdl12-compat library. For Godot the program can upgrade projects. I have yet to find a project that works after doing that. One of my projects worked after a few simple fixes which could have been automated and done during upgrade. The gist document for godot migration that someone made is over 300 lines. That is just short notes about changes. It is not a detailed conversion guide like SDL has.

I don't think the problem is that compatibility is difficult. It's a mindset problem. They look at it as you should keep using godot 3 and use godot 4 on your next project. They are different engine so there isn't a strong need for an upgrade option. Godot 2 games were similarly abandoned.

Unfortunately for open source, we then need to decide how to resolve the situation. Do we maintain godot 3 and 4 (and future versions) forever? Do we do a painful migration every major release? Do we simply lose older games?

PeterOlsson

I watched the talk a few days ago. It was interesting to hear about the history and philosophy behind SDL, and also about some of the new stuff they are planning for SDL3 (I already knew some things from reading their github discussions).

I don't think there is any hurry for projects to move from SDL2 to SDL3 right now because there are still a lot of BREAKING changes being made as we speak. Compared to SDL2, SDL3 has changed the name of some types and functions. Some functions have the same name but have changed return type and/or parameters.

TPW

dulsi Don't get me wrong - I can understand your strain from it, but we do lose old movies, music, and games all the time - it is a quintessential part of art and culture. IIRC, only 20% of silent movies are still available - everything else is lost. And the "expiration date" for software is even shorter. Even big productions are affected from this (see the whole topic of imperfect emulation for most systems). Making a project open source is likely to make restoration easier, but only if there are people who care about a specific project - everything else is bound to vanish.

poVoq

dulsi I don't think the problem is that compatibility is difficult. It's a mindset problem. They look at it as you should keep using godot 3 and use godot 4 on your next project.

Indeed a typical commercial game development mind-set. Only new titles earn you money and maintenance is expensive. It is shifting a bit with the more recent games as a service model (similar to MMORPGs), but the market for perpetually updated and expanded games is small and monetization is tricky as well.

Godot is a nice project, but it is very clear that the main developers / founders come from the commercial games industry and have a corresponding mind-set. In addition their main commercial sponsors seem to mainly come from the gambling industry (touch-screen slot machines) who are also unlikely to care much about updating their games beyond the bare minimum.

Technopeasant

I know the response will probably be "just watch the talk", and fair enough, but what is meant to be the main change between SDL 2 and 3?

[deleted]

seriously, I don't see any point in using SDL2. SDL1 was nice because it was simple to use, but SDL2 is not. So, if you're going to complexity and just search for a window toolkit, just use glfw3 and you'll be fine. It even will prevent the bugs around unicode inputs, that I had soooo many times with SDL using projects.

So, I also wonder what SDL3 could bring to SDL2? More complexity? Thanks but no.

dulsi

The biggest thing seems to be the cross platform shader language. They talked about how SDL2 was great for 2D but now even if you are doing 2D you often was access to shaders. They are also making it thread safe.

I haven't tried glfw3 so I can't compare it to SDL2. I will say that SDL2 isn't much more complex than SDL1. I've ported many games and it was generally very quick to do. But if SDL1 does everything you want you can keep using the sdl12-compat which translates the calls to SDL2. SDL3 is having the same thing with SDL2.