Help about project :)

[Dejsan]

Hi everyone,
am new on this forum, and here's my story
Am making a game dev team here in Serbia and some of us are still in high school.
My name is Dejan and programming is my passion, i love games and i love to program everything.
Am a leader of this team and i have 2 programmers, 1 game tester that knows to work with audio too, and soon I'll have and some designers for game, our website,...

I found out for this game library and am trying to choose in witch library,game engine we will work on our game.
It's not my first time to make games, but it's first time to go commercial so guys i need your help about this one because i don't know so much about licensing.
I aim on free tools for a start...
So this library is totally free ? Is it good to make quality 2d games or even 3d games for commercial use?
Or should we use other game engine,library?  (am very sorry about this question but if it's not a problem i would like to get an answer if there is one)
Is it best to use Code Blocks because it's free ? Or some other compiler?

Best regards,
Dejsan.

[eXpl0it3r]

SFML is under zlib license (you can google that for more info), it basically means you can do whatever you want with it, except claiming that you wrote the whole thing. So feel free to use it, link it dynamically or statically as you like.

It's important to notice that SFML is a library, but not an engine. The library simply provides funtions to work with, where as an engine defines the actual game (processes all the data). So you'll have to write your own engine.

SFML has been successfully used for 2D and 3D games, so there are very small limits to SFML and since it's modular you don't need to use ever aspect if you don't want to.

Code::Blocks is a nice IDE which you can also use for commerical use. The compiler underneath (MinGW GCC) is also free software and can be used commercially.

[didii]

Whichever library you wish to use to program is fully up to you. I like SFML because of it's neat structure and simplicity

If you don't really know what to use, just google some more. There are plenty of forums about it and everyone seems to have a different opinion. So it should be fully up to you. Take a look at the tutorials if you want to know a little bit more about the language. Should give you enough insight of how the language should work (that's how I did in anyway).

[Nexus]

SFML has been successfully used for 2D and 3D games

You should however mention that SFML provides no functionality for 3D graphics. One would have to combine SFML with raw OpenGL or another library like Irrlicht, if possible.

Generally, SFML is definitely a good choice for game programming. If not for the graphics, there are still the Audio and Network modules with very useful and simple-to-use functionality.

Is it best to use Code Blocks because it's free ? Or some other compiler?

On Windows, I recommend Visual Studio, in my opinion it is the most powerful C++ IDE. The Express Edition is free. And students possibly also have access to the other editions.