olcPixelGameEngine VS SDL

Compare olcPixelGameEngine vs SDL and see what are their differences.

olcPixelGameEngine

The official distribution of olcPixelGameEngine, a tool used in javidx9's YouTube videos and projects (by OneLoneCoder)

SDL

Simple Directmedia Layer (by libsdl-org)
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olcPixelGameEngine SDL
43 194
3,718 8,205
- 4.2%
4.2 10.0
11 days ago about 10 hours ago
C++ C
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later zlib License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

olcPixelGameEngine

Posts with mentions or reviews of olcPixelGameEngine. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-03-10.

SDL

Posts with mentions or reviews of SDL. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-19.
  • C-Macs ā€“ a pure C macOS application
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Apr 2024
    The linked project doesn't use any ObjC files at all. SDL2 has a bunch of Cocoa files[1] so you did use Cocoa even if unknowingly.

    [1] https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/tree/main/src/video/cocoa

  • Revert "video: Prefer Wayland over X11 (take 2)"
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Mar 2024
    Correct. It's explained here:

    https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/9345#issuecomment-201...

    XWayland has special hooks into the compositors that normal wayland clients don't get.

  • Semantic Patching in C with Coccinelle
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Dec 2023
    Found about this through the release of SDL 3: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/build-scripts/SD...
  • reflect-cpp - Now with compile time extraction of field names from structs and enums using C++-20.
    9 projects | /r/cpp | 9 Dec 2023
    https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/include/SDL3/SDL_events.h
  • BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Nov 2023
    If that app ran in a 640x480 mode, memory accesses would be just as fast as the VGA applications 25 years ago, correct?

    I think there's a lot more going on than that. Here's SDL's current pixel access code:

    https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/src/video/SDL_su...

  • Games! How they write code for SDL (+ interview with the creator)
    1 project | dev.to | 17 Nov 2023
    We use the code examples throughout the article. The ellipsis characters "...." in the code were added by the author of the article. You can find the source files on the official GitHub of libsdl. In addition, each fragment has a reference to a specific area in the code. By the time this article is published, many errors will have already been fixed thanks to the issues we opened (for example, here and there). However, the links in the examples point exactly to the code you see in this article. Not only do we enjoy teasing developers but we also like making their projects a little bit better!
  • Regarding including external libraries and prefix folders.
    1 project | /r/cpp_questions | 30 Sep 2023
    FetchContent_Declare(SDL2 GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL.git GIT_TAG release-2.28.3 ) FetchContent_MakeAvailable(SDL2)
  • SDL3 Filesystem API RFC
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Aug 2023
  • Chip8 emulator
    2 projects | /r/EmuDev | 17 Aug 2023
    It's not that difficult, I recently started learning to use graphics APIs myself. OpenGL is for linux, etc., directx for windows and vulkan for all platforms. I read through a bunch of forums yesterday and decided to go for vulkan (here is a link to the sdk) for my next small projects because it can run on all platforms. I would recommend to watch a basic tutorial series (like this one) for the graphics api itself to get an understanding of whats going on. And on top of that I use SDL2 for eventhandling and ImGui for the graphical user interface. Here is a link to a guide for setting up vulkan on your platform in case you would go for it.
  • Felt Cute, Might git rm --rf
    3 projects | dev.to | 11 Aug 2023
    SDL (which will be bumped to SDL3), straight from the authoritative https://github.com/libsdl-org/sdl

What are some alternatives?

When comparing olcPixelGameEngine and SDL you can also consider the following projects:

raylib - A simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy videogames programming

GLFW - A multi-platform library for OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Vulkan, window and input

imgui - Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies

raygui - A simple and easy-to-use immediate-mode gui library

Godot - Godot Engine ā€“ Multi-platform 2D and 3D game engine

LearnOpenGL - Code repository of all OpenGL chapters from the book and its accompanying website https://learnopengl.com

DS4Windows - Like those other ds4tools, but sexier

The-Forge - The Forge Cross-Platform Rendering Framework PC Windows, Steamdeck (native), Ray Tracing, macOS / iOS, Android, XBOX, PS4, PS5, Switch, Quest 2

DualSenseSupport - Preliminar DualSense

entt - Gaming meets modern C++ - a fast and reliable entity component system (ECS) and much more

learn-wgpu - Guide for using gfx-rs's wgpu library.