SDL::Tutorial - introduction to Perl SDL

Tutorials

	# to read this tutorial
	$ perldoc SDL::Tutorial

	# to create a bare-bones SDL app based on this tutorial
	$ perl -MSDL::Tutorial -e 1

SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Layer, is a cross-platform multimedia library. These are the Perl 5 bindings. You can find out more about SDL at http://www.libsdl.org/.

Creating an SDL application with Perl is easy. You have to know a few basics, though. Here's how to get up and running as quickly as possible.

All graphics in SDL live on a surface. You'll need at least one. That's what SDL::App provides.

Of course, before you can get a surface, you need to initialize your video mode. SDL gives you several options, including whether to run in a window or take over the full screen, the size of the window, the bit depth of your colors, and whether to use hardware acceleration. For now, we'll build something really simple.

SDL::App makes it easy to initialize video and create a surface. Here's how to ask for a windowed surface with 640x480x16 resolution:

	use SDL::App;

	my $app = SDL::App->new(
		-width  => 640,
		-height => 480,
		-depth  => 16,
	);

You can get more creative, especially if you use the -title and -icon attributes in a windowed application. Here's how to set the window title of the application to My SDL Program:

	use SDL::App;

	my $app = SDL::App->new(
		-height => 640,
		-width  => 480,
		-depth  => 16,
		-title  => 'My SDL Program',
	);

Setting an icon is a little more involved -- you have to load an image onto a surface. That's a bit more complicated, but see the -name parameter to SDL::Surface-new()> if you want to skip ahead.

Since $app from the code above is just an SDL surface with some extra sugar, it behaves much like SDL::Surface. In particular, the all-important blit and update methods work. You'll need to create SDL::Rect objects representing sources of graphics to draw onto the $app's surface, blit them there, then update the $app.

Note: "blitting" is copying a chunk of memory from one place to another.

That, however, is another tutorial.

SDL::Tutorial::Drawing

basic drawing with rectangles

SDL::Tutorial::Animation

basic rectangle animation

SDL::Tutorial::Images

image loading and animation

chromatic, <chromatic@wgz.org>.

Written for and maintained by the Perl SDL project, http://sdl.perl.org/.

Copyright (c) 2003 - 2004, chromatic. All rights reserved. This module is distributed under the same terms as Perl itself, in the hope that it is useful but certainly under no guarantee.