Compiling and installing the OpenSceneGraph

The osgText library adds the dependency of the freetype library for support of true type fonts, however it is not essential to the core library, so you can comment it out from compilation by modifying the src/Makefile, and src/Demos/Makefile. I you wish to use fonts then you can download freetype from www.freetype.org. The osgText library also requires an up to date GLU implementation which supports GLU1.2 tessellation routines. If you your current GLU is out of date you'll need to download the latest, for instance the sgi's sample implementation for GLU from the www.opengl.org website.

The OSG also has a set of plug-ins which support non-native 3d database and image formats, several have no dependencies on external libraries (flt,3ds,obj, lwo,dw, tga & pic), while others (pfb,jpeg,gif,tiff) require other libraries to be installed to compile them. If you don't already have them installed then don't worry, you'll still be able to use the OSG, just comment out the plugins you can't compile from the src/osgPlugins/Makefile. The core osg library and viewer has been designed to load the plug-ins at run-time only and if they are required to load a specific data set. If you don't need them for your datasets then it won't matter that you haven't been able to compile all the plug-ins. A full list of dependencies and where to download the required libraries are listed in the dependencies.html

If you're coming across the OSG for the first time and want to get started quickly, go right ahead and follow the compilation instructions. You can always later download the libraries which the plug-ins require if you eventually need them.

• Compiling under Windows with Visual Studio
• Compiling under Unix (including Mac OSX and Cygwin)


Building the OSG requires 'gmake', due to the extensive use of gmake directives in the Makefiles. You can get gmake from here if you don't already have it installed: http://www.gnu.org/software/make/

Almost all of the unix compiling is done simply with make; make install with make help to bring up help. For platform specific details:

• Cygwin
• Linux
• Free BSD
• Mac OSX
• IRIX
• Solaris

Compiling under Windows with Visual Studio.

The Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 workspace file is VisualStudio.dsw located in the VisualStudio below the OSG this root directory. VC++6.0 workspace files can also be used in VisualStudio7.0 without problem.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Whilst the OSG will compile cleanly with the basic VC++6.0 and its own STL implementation, the OSG will crash regularily due to bugs in VC++6.0's STL. VC++6.0's STL is horribly broken and therefore is *NOT* supported. Do not attempt to use the OSG in conjunction with native VC++6.0 STL implemention.

The supported combinations are:

1. Visual Studio7.0 .NET
2. Visual Studio6.0 + Dinkumware's STL bug fix patches (see details below).
3. Visual Studio6.0 + STLport (see details below)

The OSG is composed of a number of scene graph libraries (with Core in front of the project names), executables (with Demos in front of the project names), and plugins which read and write 3D data formats and 2D image formats (with osgPlugins in front of the project names). To get the OSG running you'll need at least to compile Core osg,osgUtil,osgDB,osgGLUT, osgPlugin dot_osg and Demo sgv. The rest of the libraries and executables are optional and can be compiled if you need them, however for simplicity I would recommend doing a batch build of all the libraries and executables in the distribution, some of the plug-ins which support non native file formats may not compile due to dependencies on other libraries (such as libpng), you can ignore these compilation errors unless you need to load the related file types. To help the compilation the plugins, osgGLUT and osgText one can download .zip archive will all the dependencies in it. Further details on this .zip file can be found in dependencies.html

To execute the viewer the file path for the .dll's and .exe, both compiled into the OSG's bin directory, need to be setup, such as by adding the PATH to your autoexec.bat, its also useful to add the OSGFILEPATH to your autoexec.bat to help the location of datafiles. For example :

SET OSGFILEPATH=D:\OpenSceneGraph-Data;D:\OpenSceneGraph-Data\Images
SET PATH=C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND;D:\osg-0.8.43\bin;

To help compilation of the image reader plugins, various image libraries have been zipped up for your convenience, your find these on the OSG release download directory

Using Visual Studio .NET

Using Dinkumware STL

Once it is installed everything should compile fine and not crash, but you won't be running at full speed since the build #ifdef's out some important state optimizations since the basic VisualStudio can't handle it. You can safely remove the #ifdef from src/osgUtil/Otimizer.cpp, Line 44. The #ifdef is smart enough to do this automatically when using VisualStudio .NET and STLport so that modification by hand won't be required. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a special define associated with the Dinkumware STL for the #ifdef to pick up on.

Using STLport

A very good HOWTO for installing and making the STLPort libs on MSVC6 can be found at http://www.softadvances.com/articles/stlportusing.html

The OSG has been tested under Windows with STLport-4.5, which allows the users to configure the type of STL support required for STLport itself. The key configuration that the OSG needs to do is to enable the wrapping of MS's own iostreams, than using STLport's own implementation. The later is not required because this has not be problematic under Windows, it is only the container classes and algorithms that need replacing. Using the iostream wrapping option means the STLport can just be used on your include path, there is no need to compile STLport itself, or link into any special libraries. To configure STLport simply comment IN (its commented out by default), the following line from STLport-4.5/stlport/stl_user_config.h so it should look:

# define _STLP_NO_OWN_IOSTREAMS 1

Then configure the includes path in Visual Studio to pick up on STLport: Select the "Tools" menu. Select "Options" In the Options dialog, select the "Directories" tab Under the "include" option, add the path to STLport4.5, something like: D:/STLport4.5/stlport Then press the up array to move the entry all the way to the top of the list, thus overriding MS's own STL implementations.

Linking your own apps to the OpenSceneGraph

All OpenSceneGraph libraries, plugins and executables are compiled with the multi-threaded dll option turned ON, and with RTTI turned ON. Your own projects which link to the OpenSceneGraph must uses these same options or your application will crash or produce unpredicatable behavior.

Syntax highlight + OpenScenegraph Standard C++ style headers

The OpenSceneGraph uses Standard C++ style extensionless headers, which poor VisualStudio doesn't automatically recognize as suitable for syntax highlighting (compile works fine though), even the StandardC++ header themselves require a hack to get VisualStudio to highlight them properly. The easy answer is to use that same hack to get it to recognize the OpenSceneGraph headers too. To make easy a modified header listing file can be found in the VisualStudio/LANDEXT.DAT. First copy the original LANDEXT.DAT file (located in C:\Progam Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\Common\MSDev98\Bin) to LANDEXT.DAT.BKP, and then copy over the OpenSceneGraph one. Once you have done this VisualStudio will syntax highlight them without problem.

Compiling under Linux

% make

% make install

% make instlinks

% make help

The osgText library now depends upon GLU1.3 functionality, and only the recent Mesa version have this as standard. Unfortunately not all Linux distributions are up to date even recent ones. If you have problems compiling osgText due to GLU problems then check out the details at the bottom of this file, under the title RedHat7.1 & GLU1.3 for a quick way of installing GLU1.3 in the right place.

RedHat 7.2 & GLU1.3

English

1) Untar the tarball. It will create a directory called fixosg/
2) Change to the ReadHat7.2_fixglu/ directory
3) Become root
4) Run the script called fixglu

tar xvzf ReadHat7.2_fixglu.tar.gz
cd ReadHat7.2_fixglu/
su (your root password)
./fixglu
exit

Compiling under FreeBSD

% make

% make install

% make instlinks

% make help

Compiling under IRIX

Compile, from the OSG root directory, ('%' is UNIX csh prompt) type:

% make

% make install

% make instlinks

% make help

Compiling under Solaris

% make

% make install

% make instlinks

% make help

Compiling under MacOS X

• The Apple developer tools website.

Everything is done command-line, so you need to get to a shell before proceeding. The Mac comes with an app in Applications/Utilities called Terminal - open up any Finder window (e.g double-click on your hard disk icon), click on the Applications icon at the top right of the window, then click on the Utilities folder to get access to the Terminal. When you start Terminal it brings you up a csh running from your ~/ directory. Now, go to your OpenSceneGraph directory, and simply type:

make -j2

• The fink project.
• The GNU-Darwin project.

Running the examples

setenv OSGHOME `pwd`/OpenSceneGraph
setenv OSGFILEPATH `pwd`/OpenSceneGraph-Data
setenv OSG_LD_LIBRARY_PATH ${OSGHOME}/lib
setenv DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH ${OSG_LD_LIBRARY_PATH}

Notes

• Input Focus: Many OSG examples have keyboard commands, however, when launching apps from the Mac Terminal, the focus seems to remain in the Terminal. Option-Clicking on the graphics window focuses it as the recipient of events, and allows these keyboard commands to then function properly.
• Known Bugs:
• Installation: No package based version of an OS X installer yet exists.

Compiling under Cygwin

OSG_FILE_PATH environmental variable

For the OSG to locate file data files easily an environmental variable OSG_FILE_PATH is used at run-time by the osgDB library. Note, for examples below substitute in the ${OSGDATA} directory with your own path where appropriate) Add the following to your .cshrc (note paths separated by colon's): setenv  OSG_FILE_PATH ./:${OSGDATA}:${OSGDATA}/Images Or the following if you're using a sh compatible shell : export  OSG_FILE_PATH=./:${OSGDATA}:${OSGDATA}/Images: Or under windows (note paths seperated by semi-colon's) : SET  OSG_FILE_PATH=./:${OSGDATA};${OSGDATA}/Images