I love release notes like this. Tons of work done, care was taken to make sure it works well, made all the right decisions, and it's entirely drop in replaceable with less (zero) dependencies and fuss.
Just picked up an SDL-based game recently, might need to try this out now.
It's interesting that it's moved to single-file libraries for format support, because I think those libraries have effectively replaced it already. Having a single interface supporting multiple formats is a nice thing, though.
There are some disadvantages to these single header libraries, though they may very well be a non-issue for SDL_sound. As an example: I believe stb vorbis doesn’t support “gapless” playback that trims padded silence necessitated by lapped MDCT compression, and IIRC it also does not have sample-accurate fast seeking. This would make it challenging to implement loop points in streaming music using stb vorbis; even if you decode the entire stream into memory to get sample accurate seeking, you still need to compensate for the padded silence.
Truly depends on one’s use case and desired trade-offs.
The name “Icculus” stirs up memories. When I started coding, I used SDL, and the guys at Loki let me help as a volunteer beta tester. I got to test Mindrover and Descent III. I’ve still got hard copies of some of their ports including Sim City 3000.
Yes, that was back in the day I still used to subscribe to Linux Format, had an email signature with something M$ on it and still believed on the year of desktop Linux.
Also when Sam still tried to make a living out of selling SDL support without much luck.
Nowadays the only way to get studios to care is to port Windows binaris into Linux, despite Android, even Google is now creating their own flavour of Windows emulation for Stadia (not that will save Stadia anyway).
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Just picked up an SDL-based game recently, might need to try this out now.
Truly depends on one’s use case and desired trade-offs.
Also when Sam still tried to make a living out of selling SDL support without much luck.
Nowadays the only way to get studios to care is to port Windows binaris into Linux, despite Android, even Google is now creating their own flavour of Windows emulation for Stadia (not that will save Stadia anyway).
but it does look like there was a recent project to make it happen: https://github.com/juliogonzalez/sc3u-linux
https://wiki.debian.org/EmbeddedCopies