I am writing a solving program for a abstract 3d puzzle (think tetris but then much more complex)
For the visualisation i was thinking to pick up on SDL programming again (stopped halfway in a SDL project a year ago due to lack of time)
I was thinking to either draw the result
- in a wireframe
- using surfaces with a high transparancy so you can see the different pieces through eachother
- or a combination of the above

and then use some form of controls to rotate the result, i am not sure about that yet.

Some things i remember/found out:
In SDL there are no neat drawing functions for lines etc, especialy if i want to make a wireframe with nice anti aliased stuff i will have to do a lot of pixeplotting madness.
OpenGL requires a lot of code to get simple things working, though one that is done the amount of work should be ok. Also it has a very steep learning curve.

Now as for my question: what aproach would you guys take / think would work, and what programming angle would you follow. (pure SDL? OpenGL through SDL? What libraries?)

This post has been edited by Trogdor: 19 Jun, 2008 - 01:52 PM

OpenGL with GLUT is very portable and not too bad to get going.

Enabling wireframe rendering in OpenGL is pretty easy, not sure how it compares to SDL (though I'm pretty sure in SDL you can just call OpenGL code, I've never used it though).

An example from my engine.


Edit: I'm pretty sure there's some OpenGL function for "smooth lines", aka antialiasing.

This post has been edited by Tom9729: 19 Jun, 2008 - 03:05 PM

Yeah i think its something like