PLIB is a suite of Open Source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 portable computer game libraries, originally written by Steve Baker in 1997 and licensed under the LGPL.

PLIB includes sound effects, music, a complete 3D engine, font rendering, a simple windowing library, a game scripting language, a GUI

Gui

Gui or guee is a generic term to refer to grilled dishes in Korean cuisine. These most commonly have meat or fish as their primary ingredient, but may in some cases also comprise grilled vegetables or other vegetarian ingredients. The term derives from the verb, "gupda" in Korean, which literally...

, networking, 3D math library and a collection of utility functions. All are 100% portable across nearly all modern computing platforms. Each library component is fairly independent of the others to encourage replacement with other libraries like SDL

Simple DirectMedia Layer

Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform, free and open source multimedia library written in C that presents a simple interface to various platforms' graphics, sound, and input devices....

 or FLTK

FLTK

FLTK is a cross-platform GUI library developed by Bill Spitzak and others. Made with 3D graphics programming in mind, it has an interface to OpenGL, but it is also suitable for general GUI programming....

.

PLIB has been used by many projects (not all games, and not all open source), but has not kept pace with technical developments that happened after its original conception (e.g., shader

Shader

In the field of computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that is used primarily to calculate rendering effects on graphics hardware with a high degree of flexibility...

 technology), so it is currently outdated and rarely used for new projects. While nowadays there are better portable and Open Source replacements for all of its components are available, a similar comprehensive suite of libraries is still missing.

See also

• Allegro
  Allegro library
  Allegro is a free and open source software library for video game development.The functionality of the library includes support for basic 2D graphics, image manipulation, text output, audio output, midi music, input and timers, as well as additional routines for fixed-point and floating-point...
  
  
• OpenML
  OpenML
  Open Media Library is a free, cross-platform programming environment designed by the Khronos Group for capturing, transporting, processing, displaying, and synchronizing digital media .-See also:* SDL* Allegro* ClanLib* OpenGL* OpenAL* PLIB-External links:* *...
  
  
• Simple DirectMedia Layer
  Simple DirectMedia Layer
  Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform, free and open source multimedia library written in C that presents a simple interface to various platforms' graphics, sound, and input devices....
  
  
• DirectX
  DirectX
  Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay,...
  
  
• OpenGL
  OpenGL
  OpenGL is a standard specification defining a cross-language, cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. The interface consists of over 250 different function calls which can be used to draw complex three-dimensional scenes from simple primitives. OpenGL...
  
  
• ClanLib
  ClanLib
  ClanLib is a cross-platform C++ game SDK, currently supporting Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It has full hardware accelerated graphics support through OpenGL, and also a software renderer...