I have a Snake game in-development (up at https://github.com/RobotGymnast/Gingerbread/tree/eventThreaded). Initially, everything (graphics, events, game logic update, physics) were called from a “main” thread. Then I started multithreading (using boost threads). It’s been pretty straightforward, but I recently split the graphics display logic into a new thread, which allocated the screen object in its local stack space. Then I split my event-detection and event-handling logic into a new thread. Then my screen stopped appearing. Judging by my command-line output, everything still worked fine, just the screen stopped appearing. It turned out it was hanging on my SDL_SetVideoMode() call.
I fixed this by allocating my screen object in the “main” thread, and passing in a reference to the graphics thread. For some reason, allocating the screen object in a new thread from the event logic was creating problems.
Since this fix, the event-detection and event-handling no longer works. The event checks are still being made, e.g. SDL_PollEvent(), but they’re not picking up any events at all (keyboard, mouse, etc.).
My suspicion is that SDL might do some behind-the-scenes thread syncing, but I’ve been using boost threads. Could this be a problem? SDL threads are rather restrictive, and I’d rather not switch.
Anybody had this issue before? Any recommendations?
I’m not sure about SDL, but on several windowing subsystems (I believe on both X and Win32), you cannot modify ANYTHING related to a graphics object or widget, except from the thread which initially created that graphics object/widget.
It doesn’t look like (to my limited 10 second google search) SDL abstracts that bit from you — you’d need to only modify graphics related objects from the thread that created them. To do otherwise is to invite strange behavior.