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.
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.
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.
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, 2.0.12, 2.0.14, 2.0.16 |
SDL2_image (Optional) | www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_image | 2.0.5 |
SDL2_mixer (Optional) | www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_mixer | 2.0.4 |
SDL2_ttf (Optional) | www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_ttf | 2.0.4 |
The library is distributed in two flavours, either as a single amalgamated centurion.hpp
header
(located in the include
folder), or simply as all the headers provided in the src
folder. 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.
The Doxygen documentation for the latest stable release can be found here.