Sill

What is Sill?

In short, Shaltif's Independent Language Library is a free 'All-in-One' C/C++ software development engine geared toward 2D game creation.

Sill is being created to satisfy two primary goals:

• Have an easy to use solution for 2D application and game development that utilizes today's hardware accelerated systems.
• To give developers a simple to maintain environment that allows for cross-platform support.

Sill encompasses a large variety of functionality to satisfy the many needs of software developers, including:

• Hardware accelerated 2D graphic rendering
  • Simple function based API for easy and fast 2D development
  • Wide variety of built-in image file loading support (bmp, png, jpeg, gif, tga)
  • Advanced texture/sprite manipulation and filtering
  • Direct framebuffer objects, dynamic views and windowing options
  • Drawing primitives including lines, rectangles, circles, complex polygons, etc
  • Accelerated text rendering using font files or bitmap resources
  • Scaling, color & alpha blending, and rotation support for all drawing functions
  • ...with many more advanced rendering features available
• Input handling for mouse, keyboard and joysticks/gamepads
• A complete software audio engine
  • Including a multi-channel mixer
  • Per channel specific effects such as volume and panning
  • Capable of loading a variety of file formats (wav, ogg, mp3, mod, xm, it, s3m)
• Object -> Instance achitecture for simple OOP development
  • Robust event system with automatic and customizable events
  • Dynamic data and structure management per instance
• Collision detection system with on-the-fly construction and testing for complex polygon types
• File management, including directory and file read/write support (both plain and binary level)
• Networking for LAN and online applications
  • Simple & complete network API solution for Sill to Sill application connections
  • Additional direct socket based interface option for generic low level communication
• General purpose API's for dealing with strings, advanced math operations, random values, colors and memory management
• Terminal console output support
• Flexible sub systems which allow for using each independently (render, network, audio, system, etc)

All of the above is easily usable with a simple C functional based interface.

Minimum Requirements

For a Sill based application to run, the target system needs to have the following:

Windows

• Windows XP, Vista or 7 (older OS's not tested)
• OpenGL 1.4 or better for graphical rendering (dedicated hardware graphics card for best performance)
• DirectX 8 for audio support
• WinSock 2 to enable network communication

Software developers, please make sure the appropriate back-end libraries for the target platform are included/distributed with your creation. For more specific information, head over to Sill's download page