rlsw – Raylib software OpenGL renderer in less than 5k LOC (opens in new tab)

The mantra for the library is "raylib is a simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy videogames programming." It's for hobbyist, learners, tinkerers, or just those that want to enjoy minimalistic graphics programming without having to deal with interfacing with modern machines yourself.

The default Windows installer bundles the compiler and a text editor to make poking at C to get graphics on the screen (accelerated or not) a 1 step process. Raylib is also extremely cross platform, has bindings in about every language, and has extra (also header only, 0 dependency) optional libraries for many adjacent things like audio or text rendering.

When I first started to learn C/C++ in the 2000s I spent more time fighting the IDE/Windows/GCC or getting SDL/SFML to compile than I did actually playing with code - and then it all fell apart when I tried to get it working on both Linux and Windows so I said fuck it and ignored that kind of programming for many years. Raylib is about going the opposite direction - start poking at C code (or whatever binding) and having it break and worry about the environment later when you're ready for something else.

This site is for hackers, which basically means people who like to do things like this. If you can't understand why someone would be interested in this, probably you should remain silent and try to understand hackers rather than commenting.

As someone who was once a child trying to figure out how to compile and link things to use SDL, I think there's some educational value in letting people make games without having to dive deep into how to use C++ toolchains.

As someone working on a game engine with a multithreaded SSE/NEON implementation of ~GL 1.3 under the hood, this is rad for many reasons other than portability or compatibility. You get full access to every pixel and vertex on the screen at any point in the rendering pipeline. This allows for any number of cool (also likely multithreaded) postprocessing effects that you don't have to shoehorn through a brittle, possibly single-platform shading language and API.

Because GPU APIs are a nightmare clustertruck.

I mean this with all the appropriate venom we can muster: this attitude is why software quality is nonexistent.

Why not? The original Doom didn't use a GPU renderer. It should be possible to do simple 3d stuff in today's computers without it.

Oh, man! This is really cool. Do you maintain a blog or a patreon that allows people to follow the progress on the project?

Any way I can buy you a beer?

> I have to use the ancient OpenGL fixed function pipeline

Why do you have to and do you also use parts of the old immediate-mode API?

Sidenote: Can't wait for the release!

Whoah! That's so cool!

Imagine what it could do with modern SIMD and many cores. Won't come close to dGPU, but still...

I'm out of the loop -- how so?

And first written in 1997.

It would be kind of neat to have OpenGL running on AVX-512, just for fun…

Now make it fixed point

If its OpenGL why is it CPU only ?

It currently clocks it at 12.5K but that includes stuff that could easily be stripped out. I suspect, even if I had it "finished" with everything I would ever want in it, it wouldn't be more than 15-20k. PGL saves a lot by not bothering with GLSL at all.

Glad you found it fun to play with, that's what it's for. Hoping to have a new release in the next week or so, and there have been some serious/breaking changes since the last so hopefully it goes well.

And on the topic of this thread, PGL is overkill for raylib's software rendering backend since they don't need arbitrary shader support, but I would still love to try making PGL a raylib backend someday because it would be cool and running the entire set of Raylib examples would be a great stress test. Plus then I could use raylib to make a game with PGL, win-win.

No, no, no, it depends.

That's an extremely snarky reply given the post is just a direct link to the header.