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 ... 2.24 |
| 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 |
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.
The Doxygen documentation for the latest stable release can be found here.
The following is a list of known projects that make use of Centurion in some extent. Open a pull request if you're using Centurion and want to featured in this list.