Centurion

Introduction

Centurion is a modern C++ wrapper library for SDL2 designed to improve type-safety, memory safety and overall ease-of-use. The general aim of Centurion is to serve as an easy-to-use and intuitive alternative to raw SDL2, by providing the same features whilst being safer and easier to use. However, there are also aspects of the library that have no direct counterparts in SDL.

#include <centurion.hpp>

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
  const cen::sdl sdl;  // Init SDL
  const cen::img img;  // Init SDL_image
  const cen::mix mix;  // Init SDL_mixer
  const cen::ttf ttf;  // Init SDL_ttf

  cen::window window {"Centurion"};
  cen::renderer renderer = window.make_renderer();
  
  window.show();

  bool running = true;
  while (running) {
    cen::event_handler event;
    while (event.poll()) {
      if (event.is(cen::event_type::quit)) {
        running = false;
      }
    }

    renderer.clear_with(cen::colors::coral);
    renderer.present();
  }

  window.hide();
  return 0;
}

Not Just a Wrapper Library

Centurion is not just a wrapper library. A lot of effort has been put into improving the SDL APIs by utilising the full power of modern C++17 and C++20. Which has led to APIs that are far more expressive and intuitive to use, compared to plain C.

Features

The following is a (non-exhaustive) list of the features of Centurion.

• Window management
• Hardware-accelerated rendering (with basic support for OpenGL and Vulkan)
• TrueType font handling
• System events
• Keyboard input
• Mouse input
• Game controller and joystick input
• Force feedback
• Sound effects
• Music
• System information about platform, CPU, RAM, screen, battery, clipboard, counters, locale, etc.
• Filesystem information
• Cursor management
• Multi-threading utilities
• Message boxes
• Compiler information

Additionally, many Centurion components feature serialization support based on the Cereal API, string conversions, streaming support, etc. The library can be used with either C++17 or C++20, and will use appropriate facilities depending on the language version used. For example, the library will make use of std::format, if it is available.

Dependencies

The following table shows the supported versions of SDL2 and its extension libraries. Only the core SDL library is mandatory. The extension libraries can be disabled at compile-time, by defining any of CENTURION_NO_SDL_IMAGE , CENTURION_NO_SDL_MIXER or CENTURION_NO_SDL_TTF, respectively.

Dependency	Source	Supported versions
SDL2	www.libsdl.org	2.0.10 ... 2.26
SDL2_image (Optional)	www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_image	2.0.5 ... 2.6
SDL2_mixer (Optional)	www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_mixer	2.0.4 ... 2.6
SDL2_ttf (Optional)	www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_ttf	2.0.15 ... 2.20

Installation

The library is distributed as a header-only library, which can be found in the src directory. Just download the headers include them in your project, and the library it's ready to be used. You will of course also need to install SDL2.

Documentation

For additional documentation, see the wiki, hosted on GitHub.