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STEVE'S PORTABLE GAME LIBRARY.

    And Lo, the Lion and the Sheep shall lie down together - but the Sheep won't get much Sleep.
    -- Woody Allen
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Hardware Requirements for Running PLIB

To do good 3D graphics, you'll need an OpenGL-compatible 3D graphics accellerator that your operating system supports. Most systems can run OpenGL in software only - but performance is so poor as to be unusable in the kinds of application for which PLIB is intended.

If you want to hear sound effects and music, you'll obviously need a sound card and some speakers or headphones.

Software Requirements for Running PLIB

The PLIB team works hard to minimise our dependance on other libraries to make it easy for end-users to install application software without having to visit dozens of web sites to collect the libraries they need.
  • 3D/2D Graphics: OpenGL. If you aren't already set up to run OpenGL, you should check:
    • The OpenGL ARB site.
    • Or download Mesa (which is an excellent OpenGL clone by Brian Paul).
    • If you are a Linux user, you may wish to check the Linux3D Site.
    • If you are a Windoze or Macintosh user, you should have had a copy of OpenGL delivered with your operating system.
  • Windowing: GLUT (The OpenGL Utility Toolkit by Mark Kilgard) - fully portable windowing library with support for mouse and keyboard. As an alternative, there is an OpenSource clone of GLUT called freeglut - it works very well with PLIB applications and is maintained by many of the same people. It's perfectly possible to write PLIB programs that don't use GLUT - but the examples and demo's do require it.

How Portable is PLIB?

VERY!
  • All flavors of Win32 (Win 2000, WinME, WinNT, Win95 and Win98) are supported, using either MSVC++ or CygWin for compilation. Theoretically you could use Borland C++ also, but since there is little user base these days, the necessary 'project' files to build PLIB under Borland's IDE do tend to get outdated.
  • All flavors of Linux are supported - on any CPU platform that supports Xfree86 and OpenGL.
  • Most other UNIX-like systems (at least BSD, IRIX, Solaris, OS-X).
  • MacOS now runs everything except the joystick library. I have yet to hear of anyone who has a Mac with a joystick - so this isn't a great loss.
  • Support for BeOS is problematic - for some reason, people who are prepared to help out with porting PLIB to BeOS are hard to find. However, since BeOS (I'm told) has compatibility with GLUT, OpenGL and OSS, it should be easy to port to.

Steve J. Baker. <sjbaker1@airmail.net>