SDL for 3D game programming?

Question

I have been studying SDL for a few weeks and I have succeeded in making a 2D Ping-Pong game, but I want to get started in 3D development, and I'd like to know if SDL is capable (and suitable) for 3D game development, or I must use OpenGL(And where can I find some good tutorials for it)?

Answer 1

SDL isn't a 3D graphics engine. As is stated in its homepage:

Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer.

That "3D hardware via OpenGL" basically means that SDL contains some helper functions to ease cross-platform usage of OpenGL, but you'd still need to learn and code raw OpenGL (which isn't a bad choice if you want to better understand 3D graphics). If you'd like a higher level approach, you should look at some complete 3D engines, such as Ogre or Irrlicht. They use OpenGL underneath (or Direct3D on Windows), but provide easier API with lots of stuff like model loading and scene graph.

Answer 2

SDL by itself is not meant for 3D (you can make your own software renderer but you wouldn't get very far with it) however SDL does come with an OpenGL wrapper/addon so you can use SDL's windowing, audio, and input system while using OpenGL. Refer to the link in the other post (SDL + OpenGL) for more info and use nehe.gamedev.net for OpenGL tutorials.