The Preamble:The hardest things for me when taking on a programming project is not the programming itself. It's either the design (how should I lay out my code and modularize it so that I can understand it a week from now, or add to it later), or getting the <angry-word> libraries to compile.
So, in an effort to make my life easier in the future I'd like to put together a sort of customized game library using Box2D. It won't have any game logic or anything like that, I just want a basic Visual Studio template for getting started on a game. It should include Box2D, a sound library, and a graphics library. Maybe some libraries for reading various image and sound types too. It should be fully contained, ie, not require any DLL's or runtime garbage, or depend on any other non-standard libraries, and it should be cross platform, and light.
The Question:My basic question is, which libraries would you guys recommend? Right now I'm looking at GLFW+OpenAL.
The Rationale:I've used SDL in the past, when I first started learning how to program with graphics, but it seems rather slow (depending on what you're using it for) and limited, and I found OpenGL was actually much easier to work with after you understand it. I heard a rumor that GLFW was "better" [than GLUT] and is actually still being updated, unlike
OpenGL GLUT which has been discontinued AFAIK.
For sound libraries, I've never actually got around to adding sound to a game before, so I really don't know much about this. OpenAL seems like the obvious compliment to OpenGL. It seems to give you quite a bit of control, and it's the first library I've actually managed to compile and get to play a sound (woohoo!). But I'm open to other suggestions if you think they're better.
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