Tag Archives: SDL

Webcam streaming, signals, and Computer Vision

In my previous blog post, I wrote about my webcam library, which I recently applied to an SDL application to show streaming pictures in an SDL frame, and it works pretty well. The code can be found in a branch on my GitHub.

When I posted about my webcam library on a social network, someone mentioned a C++ library that would do all the computer vision stuff I mentioned in the blog post. This library is called OpenCV. I took a quick look, and it seems very feature-rich. It is supposed to have a set of functions for accessing the webcam as well. I guess I should read more on motion analysis and object tracking, but first I’ll play with some of the basic features of OpenCV, such as image processing and image analysis.

Continue reading Webcam streaming, signals, and Computer Vision

SDL tutorials

SDLTutorials.com offers a nice set of tutorials to get you started in game programming with the SDL library. SDL stands for “Simple DirectMedia Layer” and is a convenient layer between your application and audio, mouse, keyboard, joysticks and the screen. It also supports 3D via OpenGL.

And the good thing about SDL is that it is cross-platform: it works not only on Unix-based operating systems such as Linux and BSD flavors, but also on Windows, MacOS and MacOSX.

Check out the Yoshi branch!

The first set of tutorials introduce the SDL video screen and the SDL events. You will also learn about the basic composition of a typical game, and how to deal with animations and object collisions. The second set of tutorials deal with separate subjects within SDL which may be useful in your projects. There is an SDL playground project using C++ on my GitHub which is based on these tutorials. Don’t forget to check out the branches. Feel free to fork from it!

I have different projects in mind with SDL, such as object detection from webcam streams, and an artificial world with artificial entities in a client/server architecture. And you, what would you make?