gunslinger VS nanovg

Here's a framework that's cool: https://github.com/MrFrenik/gunslinger/. We have a great Discord community, too. Even if you don't end up using it, there are plenty of people who are willing to offer guidance regardless :). Invite link is on the author's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_HxKDNuCqA

Check out gunslinger, a pure C99 game framework, with a very clean design.

The development has been making huge strides and they have a fairly active discord channel:

https://github.com/MrFrenik/gunslinger

Make your own. If you really want to make a game in C, this may be the best option. Depending on how complex the game is that you want to make, this could be an enormous task, or not too big of a deal, in some cases it could even be easier than learning a game engine. You can use frameworks like Gunslinger to make it easier, as well. If you need guidance, the Gunslinger community is friendly and accepting of beginners :).

That being said, you may have your requirements satisfied with tagged unions which consists in implementing a struct with an anonymous union and label (like an enum) to keep track of what data is inside the union, this works really well when you know beforehand which data types you want to support. Another technique could be using macros, like the containers on the gunslinger framework, however I have never implemented something like this. Lastly you can always use void pointers, however you may need to be more clever to achieve it (I almost never use them).

Some of my favorites are: sokol/pacman.c, Gunslinger, and gb

And here is Github of his game engine of this guy: Gunslinger Game Engine

To install non exotic library from a github repo, specify just the repo-owner/repo-name or the absolute github link to the repo. E.g. to install gunslinger and stb from master branch

Looking quickly at this lib, functions of the API are not static: https://github.com/MrFrenik/gunslinger/blob/d5ebcce0647e97badc9337749d7cd9f5810eecfa/gs.h#L1415, so it might lead to ODR violation.

I use nanovg for my projects and it works surprisingly well for its size. It integration is pretty simple .... if you know a little bit of OpenGL, otherwise there is a slight learning curve.

The "engine" is built on top of amazing https://www.lwjgl.org/ and https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx/, and UI system is baked by https://github.com/memononen/nanovg and https://github.com/facebook/yoga

It's a library for drawing vector shapes, sort of like SVG - https://github.com/memononen/nanovg The old way in the SDK was with GDI+, but the benefit of a vector format is scalability to higher resolutions and better GPU usage. The workaround potentially costs some frames, but its better than bust panels for now.

If you are a beginner in computer graphics, I strongly suggest you to look at the nanovg library: it contains all the primitives you might want to render (circles, lines, filled polygons, text, images, ...). Integrating it in existing codebase is not that hard, since the library is rather small.

NanoVG is the closest thing I came across when I had a similar quesiton: https://github.com/memononen/NanoVG

unfortunately it doesn't seem like it's getting steady updates now unlike the last time I checked. But I imagine it's pretty mature at this point. There also seem to be ports in Metal/DX11 if you didn't want to be stuck in OpenGL.

Also there's NanoVG if you really want a vector api in C, but don't need anti-aliased clipping.

Getting sufficient antialiasing quality for 2D graphics is difficult on GPUs. https://github.com/memononen/nanovg accomplishes this with GL2/GLES2 level hardware for most of the stuff one would want to render as part of a GUI. My project https://github.com/styluslabs/nanovgXC supports rendering arbitrary paths with exact coverage antialiasing, but requires GLES3.1 or GL4 level hardware for reasonable performance.

> to learn the 'nuts and bolts' of rendering

These nuts and bolts are very different between CPU and GPU. CPU-based libraries are painting pixels in bitmaps in system memory. Most GPU-based libraries are uploading indexed triangle meshes, and rendering them with weird shaders.

Worse, there're no good open source implementations of GPU-based ones. Microsoft ships an implementation as a part of OS (Direct2D) but it's not open source. Linux simply doesn't have an equivalent.

At least for initial versions, consider C interop with this https://github.com/memononen/nanovg It cuts a few corners (no cleartype for text, CPU overhead for repeated rendering of same static paths) but it's still good overall, simple, and easy to use.

> My only concern with C# is the cross compatibility

Works well on Linux, Windows and OSX, including ARM CPUs. Not sure about Android and iOS, never tested.

My largest concern with C# would be performance. Technically the language allows to code in any style, but most guides and examples are using OO-heavy one.