Setting up opengl eclipse windows

If you are using a Mac or Linux, you will require a very different compiler set up. The Eclipse instructions will be mostly the same. Get the MinGW installer mingw-get-setup. Mark the packages:. You may also find the doc documentation and man man page options for these tools useful. This starts the download process. Because of the large number of files to download, this is a slow process and may take 20 minutes or more.

MinGW compatible libraries such as freeglut can be typically be set up in three different ways:. We assume that you have already set up Eclipse. The examples in this guide, and the installation in our labs as of this writing , is Kepler version 4. If you need a primer, please see Installing Eclipse guide, particularly the part about installing plug-ins. You must be connected to the internet in order to do an install of a plug-in from a repository.

The CDT plug-in is available as part of the Kepler package. Open the Work with: list to see the available plug-in repositories. If you do not see the Kepler repository, add it by pressing the Add button, and enter the plug-in information into the Add Repository dialog box:. After connecting to the Kepler repository the Install dialog box presents a list of the plug-ins available in the Kepler repository. Press Next , and answer the rest of the dialogs appropriately until the installation finishes.

CDT will recognize your compiler toolchain. Creating a new C project is very similar. If you have difficulties setting up an empty project, start with the "Hello World" project instead.

This creates a project entry in the Eclipse Project Explorer pane and opens the hello. The full capabilities of the CDT plug-in are extensive, but beyond the scope of this tutorial, so feel free to explore.

The libraries required for an OpenGL project vary depending on the type of program to be run, but typically such a project requires the opengl32 , glu , and glut libraries. These libraries must be explicitly added to the project.

Go to the home page of www. Download the library. Get the source codes gluegen-java-src. This is optional. Inside the jar folder, there are multiple. Hence, you need to take appropriate jar files which can execute on your desired platform.

For example, if you are using Windows bit operating system, then get the following. You could, for instance, create a single folder that contains a Libs and Include folder where we store all our library and header files respectively for OpenGL projects.

Now all the third party libraries are organized within a single location that can be shared across multiple computers. The requirement is, however, that each time we create a new project we have to tell the IDE where to find those directories. First, let's open up Visual Studio and create a new project. Since we're going to be doing everything in bit and the project defaults to bit, we'll need to change the dropdown at the top next to Debug from x86 to x In order for the project to use GLFW we need to link the library with our project.

This can be done by specifying we want to use glfw3. We thus need to add this directory to the project first. We can tell the IDE to take this directory into account when it needs to look for library and include files. From there on out you can add your own directories to let the project know where to search.

Do this for both the Library Directories and Include Directories :. Here you can add as many extra directories as you'd like and from that point on the IDE will also search those directorie when searching for library and header files. The same applies for the library directories. To then link to a library you'd have to specify the name of the library to the linker. Since the library name is glfw3.

If you're on Windows the OpenGL library opengl Since this chapter uses the VS compiler and is on windows we add opengl Note that the bit equivalent of the OpenGL library is called opengl On Linux systems you need to link to the libGL. We're still not quite there yet, since there is one other thing we still need to do. Since there are many different versions of OpenGL drivers, the location of most of its functions is not known at compile-time and needs to be queried at run-time.

Retrieving those locations is OS-specific. In Windows it looks something like this:. As you can see the code looks complex and it's a cumbersome process to do this for each function you may need that is not yet declared. Thankfully, there are libraries for this purpose as well where GLAD is a popular and up-to-date library. GLAD is an open source library that manages all that cumbersome work we talked about.