SDL Game Development

Chapter 2. Drawing in SDL

Graphics are very important to games and they can also be one of the main performance bottlenecks if not handled correctly. With SDL 2.0 we can really take advantage of the GPU when rendering, which gives us a real boost in terms of the speed of rendering.

In this chapter we will cover:

• The basics of drawing with SDL
• Source and destination rectangles
• Loading and displaying textures
• Using the SDL_image extension

Basic SDL drawing

In the previous chapter we created an SDL window but we have yet to render anything to the screen. SDL can use two structures to draw to the screen. One is the SDL_Surface structure, which contains a collection of pixels and is rendered using software rendering processes (not the GPU). The other is ...