Hey all i am looking for a howto/tutorial on how to go about setting up a game/opengl development environment on Linux. (Ubuntu Dapper) Basically howto set up opengl for development and anything else thats basically needed. (GLUT, SDL etc). What IDE (emacs/anjuta) do people use etc. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Assuming you are writing with C or C++ you need gcc : "sudo apt-get install gcc g++" in terminal, will install gcc if it's not there yet.

Then depending if you have nVidia card, you can install nvidia drivers and dev-package which gives the glext.h header for instance : "sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx nvidia-glx-dev nvidia-kernel-source".
Or if you have ati card, go to atis driver downloads to get the latest linux driver.

Or if neither you just have to use mesa : "sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa libgl1-mesa-dev libgl1-mesa-dri"

As for sdl : "sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev"

Eclipse : "sudo apt-get install eclipse eclipse-cdt".

I prefer using simple and fast text editor called Nedit and Make-replacement SCons to build projects.

Also, many engines like Ogre3d has linux support there too, so look around.
For graphics creation, you might like Gimp or Blender.

And you can also use the synaptic package manager to install these packages if you're afraid of the terminal ;)

I hope that gets you started!

ch.

Hey Christian, thanks a lot.

Do i need to do anything besides install this packages ? Add them to library paths etc ?

Also i was wondering if anyone could recommend a good book on game development under linux or at least with a linux slant. I have being looking on amazon but nearly all of them have had very bad reviews.

Is SDL the standard under linux now for handling sound/input etc and opengl for the graphics ?

Would u recommend Ogre ? I was under the impression that it wasn't strictly a game engine and that for games i might be better off looking at crystal space.

Thanks again.

Quote: Original post by caismirt
Is SDL the standard under linux now for handling sound/input etc and opengl for the graphics ?

SDL isn't so much a "standard under linux", but rather a popular cross-platform library, so you get to avoid Linux-specific code. What that means is that you'll probably be able to compile and run the game on Windows or Solaris or who-knows-what and it'll still work.

Quote: Original post by caismirt
Would u recommend Ogre ? I was under the impression that it wasn't strictly a game engine and that for games i might be better off looking at crystal space.

Ogre's a graphics engine. It's very good for doing the graphics for games. The "not a game engine" mantra you've been hearing refers to the fact that Ogre itself handles only graphics - not sound or input or networking. It follows the "Do one thing well" philosophy, which allows you to build your game from assembling your choice of components. For example, you could make your game using Ogre for graphics, and SDL for input and sound.

I don't know much about Crystal Space except that it is a "complete" game engine, which gives you the advantage that you don't need to piece together all the different components. It's your choice. If you like, try both. Make something in Crystal Space, then give Ogre a try. Learning something doesn't limit you to using only the first thing you learnt.

I use Code::Blocks under Windows and Linux. It's currently under development, and nightly builds are made available on the website. I recommend it.

Oh yeah, here's some more. Google doesn't even show this up in the first 50 entries or so when you google up "free game engine", but NeoEngine Seems to be pretty large and useful game engine, that also works on linux. Then there's also G3D, that is more of an general library for 3d applications, imaging and gaming etc.. Cross platform too.

Quote:
Do i need to do anything besides install this packages ? Add them to library paths etc ?

I dont think so. For SDL you might have to use "sdl-config" to get the command-line options for the compiler. If you call that with "--cflags" it'll give you the include paths and definitions to get the SDL going and "--libs" gives you library paths and also links the sdl libraries.

Also for a decent IDE, I give Code::Blocks a vote too. Forget Anjuta and it's autoconf-based build system. CB works pretty much like old Visual-C, just with the gcc quirks.

ch.