SDL2 cross-platform OpenGL 3+ and OpenGL ES 2.0 or 3.0

Question

Is there some super-easy basic hello world cube project (with setup tutorial) for SDL2 that builds and runs easily across (Windows, Linux eg Ubuntu, Mac OS X, Android, iOS), using modern OpenGL as in OpenGL 3.x or 4.x and OpenGLES 2.0 or 3.0?

I downloaded SDL2 and it was pretty easy to get their example testgles.cpp and testgl.cpp to build...

However, the testgl.cpp one is horribly old (gl2 style), so I tried the testgles.cpp. Unfortunately, even this is full of old style fixed function calls like glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW). And it's annoyingly over-integrated with SDLTest_Common code.

Is there a better simple clean hello world project (eg colored cube, textured cube) that I can start from?

Or is there some reason why they don't include such an example starting project or tutorial?

Or should I be using a different library instead of SDL2 that is simpler & cleaner to setup? Basically I want to write OpenGL / OpenGLES (and maybe DirectX) cross-platform C++ code. But setting up SDL2 has been a lot messier and more painful than I expected.

So far I just made an svn repository with SDL2 code and got testgl.cpp and testgles.cpp to build on those five platforms. But that used a lot of old style OpenGL/OpenGLES code, so now I am slowly hacking it to use newer stuff... It's been quite a pain. I don't get why SDL2 doesn't just include a basic hello world cross-platform starting project (eg textured cube) using modern OpenGL/OpenGLES (and DirectX).

Answer 1

SDL2 is a good way to start. I could even say, that SDL is the most popular and yet multiplatform lib for that, especially is you think about using joystics or going steam later on. There is no need to look for any other lib. But please remember, that it's just low level layer for providing media access. It's not their job to provide high quality Opengl 3.0 projects to users. What you need is to learn some modern OGL basics - and you have to do it somewhere else. As simple as that.

• A good place to start is http://www.open.gl. There is a couple of very straightforward and simple tutorials written in C++ with some SDL and SFML approach.
• Lazy Foo also cover some of the topic http://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/
• http://openme.gl/ is also nice, maybe http://openme.gl/opengl-4-x-example-using-sdl2-and-glm/ is something for you. It seems to be a quite good quality code.
• http://www.opengl-tutorial.org/ is also a great place to learn OpenGL 3.3+. It's recomended in many places.

You can always come with some kind of project like this and link to official SDL wiki. ;) SDL community will be greatfull for that.

And by the way. DirectX is "Microsoft's non-opensource SDL" - and it's very non-crossplatform.

Answer 2

If you want to write cross platform OpenGL, you might take a look at GLFW for setting up your OpenGL context. It handles simple window and context creation as well as user input.

I have a method to render a colored cube in some of my example code here. It's pretty enmeshed in my library though as it makes lots of calls out to my wrapper classes. They're also available in the same library, or you can take a look at the latest version of them here.