STEVE'S PORTABLE GAME LIBRARY PAGE.

Portable Software using Portable Libraries.

I have been using my spare time to build a set of OpenSource (LGPL) libraries that will permit programmers to write games and other realtime interactive applications that are 100% portable across a wide range of hardware and operating systems. Here is what you need - it's all free and available with LGPL'ed source code on the web. All of it works well together.

PLIB is also used by many projects, here are some of the more prominent ones:

Tux the Penguin - A Quest for herring.	TuxKart	FlightGear	Majik3D
PrettyPoly Editor	TuxFleet	TORCS	Spacething
Minigolf Maniacs	MOTE

If you are reading this document from the source distribution on your local disk, you can find the most up to date version of PLIB here:

http://plib.sourceforge.net

PLIB's web presence is currently hosted on SourceForge, and the project summary page is here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=382

What's In PLIB?

The contents of PLIB are:

GUI Widgets	Picoscopic User Interface Library (PUI)	A fully portable GUI interface that needs only GLUT, OpenGL and C++.
Sound Replay	Sound Library (SL)	A fully portable Audio driver suited to C++, GLUT and realtime applications that need low latency. Includes a simple 'MOD' music loader/player.
Matrix/Vector math	Simple Geometry Library(SG)	A set of matrix and vector math functions that was specifically written to simplify the writing of efficient OpenGL programs. You need to include this code into any SSG applications.
Scene Graph	Simple Scene Graph Library (SSG)	A scene graph library layered on top of OpenGL.
Joystick	JS	Supports more Joysticks with more axes and buttons than GLUT.
Fonts/Text	Fonts'n'Text Library (FNT)	Supports text output in OpenGL using texture mapped fonts. These are much faster to render than GLUT's fonts.
Utilities	OS Utilities Library (UL)	A simple portability library to hide basic operating system incompatibilities. UL is still in very early development.

Documentation.

All documentation is available online (click on the package name in the section above) and distributed with PLIB in HTML.

Licensing.

PLIB is OpenSource software, issued under the terms of the Library varient GNU Public License (LGPL).

Download

You can get PLIB in various versions here:

PLIB - Version 1.3.0 -- Experimental
PLIB - Version 1.2.0 -- Stable
PLIB - Version 1.2.0 RPM's for i586 Linux
PLIB - Other versions
PLIB - Latest development version (from CVS) (Use this for CVS versions of Pretty-Poly Editor).

PLIB documentation, example programs, fonts, etc are now separated from PLIB itself to cut your download times.

The online documentation is always for the latest version of PLIB, which is usually the current experimental release. If you are using the older stable release, you may want to download the documentation appropriate to that release.

Dump this into a separate directory from PLIB itself - or else all the configuration and makefiles will clash. PLIB 1.0.xx has all these examples and documents rolled into the main tarball.

I'm now using the even-version-stable/odd-version-experimental version numbering scheme made popular by the Linux Kernel and others. This means that PLIB 1.2.* will be stable versions of PLIB that will only be changed to fix bugs. PLIB 1.3.* will be experimental versions that may or may not work with your applications.

PLIB 1.0.* used to install itself into /usr/local/plib, but from version 1.1.0 onwards, the default location moved to /usr/include/plib (for header files) and /usr/lib (for libraries). The library names also change to libplib*.a instead of lib*.a as before.

This change was necessary in order that PLIB could be shipped with Linux distributions - which do not generally install anything in /usr/local.

Mailing Lists

There are three PLIB mailing lists: In order to keep the spam off the lists, it's set up so you have to subscribe in order to send mail. To do that, visit:

http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/plib-announce
A very low traffic, heavily moderated list where I'll announce new versions of PLIB.
http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/plib-users
A list for PLIB users - this would be the correct place to ask questions, report bugs and generally hang out with fellow sufferers.
http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/plib-devel
A list for people who wish to contribute to the development of PLIB - this list will have a high technical content and we'll try to keep discussions there focussed and on-topic.

Please do not send me personal mail in situations when one of the public mailing lists would be an appropriate forum - I hate it when people do that.

Requirements for PLIB

To do good 3D graphics, you'll need an OpenGL-compatible 3D graphics accellerator - and if you want to hear sounds, you'll obviously need a sound card.

In addition, you'll need the following other libraries:

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.
Windowing: GLUT (The OpenGL Utility Toolkit by Mark Kilgard) - fully portable windowing library with support for mouse and keyboard.
There is also an OpenSource clone of GLUT called freeglut - it works very well with PLIB applications.

Portability.

All flavors of Win32 (WinNT, Win95 and Win98) are supported, using either MSVC++ or CygWin for compilation. Theoretically you could use Borland too, but I have no project files to help you build.
All flavors Linux (presuming a 2.x.x series kernel) - on all platforms, although some problems have been reported on Alpha-Linux.
Most other UNIX-like systems (at least BSD, IRIX, Solaris).
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) runs X, OpenGL and OSS, it should be easy to port to.

Installation.

On most Linux and other UNIX-like OS's, it's simply a matter of unpacking the tar-ball, changing directory into the plib_x.y.z directory and typing:


   ./configure
   make
   make install

Depending on the file permissions in /usr/local, you may need to be 'root' to perform the last step. At the end of that process, you should have a set of header files in /usr/local/plib/include and a set of corresponding libraries in /usr/local/plib/lib. There are some example programs in the 'plib-x.y.z/examples' subdirectory.

WARNING: If you are using 'Mesa' instead of an 'Official' OpenGL, please make sure you followed the instructions in the Mesa installation notes that tell you to symbolically link /usr/lib/libGL.so and /usr/lib/libGLU.so to their Mesa equivelents. More modern versions of Mesa may install directly into that location - but make sure that one way or another, /usr/lib/libGL.so points to your current OpenGL/Mesa library.

Some Linux distro's install OpenGL/Mesa in /usr/X11R6/lib - that is now officially deprecated - if your OpenGL/Mesa is installed there then I suggest you add symbolic links to make the files appear to be in /usr/lib.

If you are running some non-UNIX OS, (eg MS-Windows) there may be instructions on how to build PLIB in README.{OS name}. If you have problems - or can offer to streamline the process, then please pass on your knowledge via the mailing list. In general, it isn't complicated to install - you usually just have to compile all of the source files in each directory and link each subdirectory into a separate library. Don't try to make PLIB into a M$ '.DLL' - it's not worth the effort!

If you have the Microsoft Visual C++ suite, you'll find a set of project files - one in each source directory - plus a master workspace at the top of the tree.

If you have all the Cygnus (CygWin) compiler/tools, then use the UNIX build instructions.

There is now a README.mac for Macintosh users.

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