Index Introduction Contents Install Dependencies Demos Data Viewer Stereo Plan Reference Guides

Compiling and installing the OpenSceneGraph

The scene graph depends upon Standard C++, STL and OpenGL so you need a C++ compiler up to the task and OpenGL or Mesa installed. The viewer depends upon GLUT which you'll need to download and install from the GLUT website. The OSG has it own native ascii file format, and .rgb image reader inbuilt which allows you read the example data with any dependencies other than C++, STL and OpenGL.

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 If you your current GLU is out of date you'll need to download the latest, for instance the sgi's sample implementation for GLU from the www.opengl.org website.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.

The Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 workspace file is VisualStudio.dsw located in the VisualStudio below the OSG this root directory. The OSG will compile with the basic VisualC++6.0, but, and this is a big but, the STL version which comes with VisualC++6.0 is extremely buggy and unable to handle things even as simple as std::mamp without crashing, even the latest service packs (which are recommended won't fix the STL bugs). This is a problem for the OpenSceneGraph since it makes proper use of Standard C++. One can struggle on with the MS's and expect crashes and optimization disabled, or adopt one of the following:
  1. Visual Studio .NET
  2. Dinkumware's STL bug fix patches - http://www.dinkumware.com/vc_fixes.html.
  3. STLport - http://www.stlport.org
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. 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

Looks like Microsoft have eventually got their act together on the compiler front, the compiler looks Standard C++ compliant with a solid STL implement, so this is the recommend route.

Using Dinkumware STL

The basic jist is that you'll need to download their STL implementation, and follow their instructions of how to force VisualStudio to pick up the new STL implementation. More details at http://www.dinkumware.com/vc_fixes.html.

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

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 (thanks to MS's utterly hopeless implementation of these). 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.

Compiling under Linux

Compile, from the OSG root directory, ('%' is UNIX csh prompt) type:
% make
Note, make should automatically detect linux and build optimized targets for your system. And if you wish to install the OSG type:
% make install
or
% make instlinks
To get full details of make options, type:
% make help
(highly recommended)

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

I have posted a simple fix for those of us who have been unable to correctly build OSG 0.8.43 on Redhat 7.2. You can download it at http://www.openscenegraph.org/download/dependencies/ReadHat7.2_fixglu.tar.gz To install it, follow these steps:

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
Cmd line
tar xvzf ReadHat7.2_fixglu.tar.gz
cd ReadHat7.2_fixglu/
su (your root password)
./fixglu
exit
You should then be able to do a "make" in your OSG directory and everything will build as it should. Let me know if this doesn't work and I will try to improve it. Email me directly for help instead of posting here. There's a README in the tarball with some info on what the script actually does. There's nothing wrong with OSG itself; the problem with Redhat 7.2 is that it doesn't have GLU 1.3 by default, which OSG is now dependent on (for osgText.) Good luck everyone. - Clay

Compiling under FreeBSD

Compile, from the OSG root directory, ('%' is UNIX csh prompt) type:
% make
Note, make should automatically detect linux and build optimized targets for your system. And if you wish to install the OSG type:
% make install
or
% make instlinks
To get full details of make options, type:
% make help
(highly recommended)

Compiling under IRIX

Since the OSG uses Standard C++ features such as STL it is important to have an up to date version of the MIPSPro compilers, ie. 7.3 or later. Support for MIPSPro7.2.1 has now been dropped since it was becoming to unwildy to support and is very rarely used in the OSG community. It is recommended to use MIPSPro7.3.1.1m.

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

% make
Note, make should automatically detect linux and build optimized targets for your system. And if you wish to install the OSG type:
% make install
or
% make instlinks
To get full details of make options, type:
% make help
(highly recommended)

Compiling under Solaris

Compile, from the OSG root directory, ('%' is UNIX csh prompt) type:
% make
Note, make should automatically detect linux and build optimized targets for your system. And if you wish to install the OSG type:
% make install
or
% make instlinks
To get full details of make options, type:
% make help
(highly recommended)

Compiling under MacOS X (instructions written by Phil Atkin)

For anyone who's ever used a Unix box for development it really is so simple it's insane.

You need to have installed the Developer tools from the CD that comes for free with OS X. This gives you compilers, headers, frameworks - stuff like GLUT and Carbon for developers.

Everything is done command-line, so you need to get to the underlying OS rather than the Aqua gloss. 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 all the grubby apps which give away the real OS roots underneath the shiny paint work. Anyone developing will need Terminal so much they should put it in their Dock. You do that by grabbing the icon of the app in the Utilities folder and dragging it to the bottom of your screen, at which point the other app icons in the Dock slide away to leave a gap which when you release the mouse button leaves Terminal permanently available, just a mouse click away on your desktop. When you start Terminal it brings you up a csh running under Darwin (which is the BSD-with-knobs-on that underlies OS X), and does a cd to ~ (otherwise /Users/username of whoever you are logged in as, as far as the Finder in OS X is concerned you are in the Users/username folder of the harddisk the machine booted from).

Then you are in Unix land, and it's all very familiar.

You will need a .cshrc file with $OSGHOME (as above), and this is a filename that the Mac won't let you see from the Finder or in fact generate from an app, so I used vi to create that. Then I just went

cd $OSGHOME

% make clean
% make macosx


And it sounds too good to be true but it is that simple. It's worth doing some editing on the Makefiles in the Plugins and Demos directories so that it only tries to build a subset, otherwise the developer will have to dig out the support projects like jpeg etc. I have only built up to now sgv, hangglide, osgcube, osgreflect, osgviews and in the Plugins have built osg rgb 3ds and a couple others - will check and get back to you.

Tricky bit :

Installing the libdl.a is more trouble, as you have to enable the root account on the machine, which by default is switched off as the machines ship for security reasons. Rather than typing in and risking error through paraphrase, here is a link to a site which tells you how to do this -

http://www.macos.utah.edu/Documentation/macosx/security/enablerootuser.html
Or alternately,
http://www.thinkmacintosh.com/osxfaq.html


One you have a root account enabled, you have to su root you cd to the directory which the Fink installer generates, and it puts libdl.a and the associated .h files in sensible system places so the compiler just finds them.

There is one oddball problem - if you rely on Path to find the resulting executables, a weird Core Graphics error occurs - so even though I set up my path to include $(OSGHOME)/bin, and when I cd to $OSGHOME and type for example hangglide, the application starts fine (so it is in the path), but at the point it tries to use GLUT to open a window it falls over with a CGS error (which is I think Core Graphics System). If you explicitly go bin/hangglide it works fine. Weird, it may be an OS X 10.04 issue which is gone in 10.1 or it may be a weirdy in the Mac GLUT implementation, but forewarned is forearmed. 

Compiling under Cygwin

To compile, from the OSG root directory, type: make Note, make should automatically detect your system and build optimized targets for your system. And if you wish to install the OSG type: make install Note that make symbolic links don't seem to work under cygwin, so a make instlinks will simply copy files just like make install. 'make install' places all files in /usr/local/OpenSceneGraph under appropriate sub directories. To get full details of make options, type: make help (highly recommended)

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