Software Requirements

To use the code on this site, you may need some software installed.

Compiler

Firstly, most of the code is written in C or C++, so you'll need a decent compiler. I use Microsoft's C++ compiler, either from Visual Studio, or more commonly via the command line (because it allows me to do automatic builds and testing).

You may also want to try gcc and g++, the Gnu compiler. This works well, but has library incompatibilities that can make it difficult to use third party libraries without access to their source-code. On platforms other than Windows, most people who use this code tend to use the Gnu compilers.

Libraries

I've tried to use as few dependecies as possible in the source code, and tried hard to make whatever dependencies I have used as platform independent as possible.

To build some of the demos you may have to install the appropriate libraries and headers for Open GL on your platform, including the Open GL utility library (GLU - which often comes with Open GL) and the Open GL utility toolkit (GLUT - which often doesn't).

To build some of the demos that use a regular desktop GUI, you will need wxWidgets: this is a great cross-platform toolkit for building applications. I deliberately avoided using Windows specific technology here, despite being sorely tempted, so that users on other machines had a fighting chance of getting the software to run. You can download the wxWidgets toolkit from http://www.wxWidgets.org

Build

To build the code included on the book's CD, you'll need a build automation system. Most people still use make, but I don't, because Scons is more efficient, more flexible, and doesn't require as much configuration. Sorry if that is inconvenient, but in my experience of managing large build processes with Make, a few minutes installing Scons and a few hours learning to use it can save literally days of hassle.

You can get it at http://www.scons.org/

After lots of feedback, I've since changed the way the code is built. It is now designed to be built using Visual Studio 2005 or later. Project files are included, and Scons file has been deprecated.

Python

Some of the code in these libraries is written in Python. You may not need it at all, but if you do, you'll need python 2.3 or later installed. You can get this at http://www.python.org

Documentation

To build the documentation for these projects, you'll need doxygen. This is available from http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/

Version Control Access

To access the version control repository directly, and get the latest code (as opposed to downloading bundles when I have had the chance to make them), you'll need a subversion client. See more information on the using SVN page.