PLIB: Requirements & Portability.

| # 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

| ## 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: From version 1.8.0, PLIB itself is completely independent of any other windowing library. However, some of the demo and example programs use freeglut (or at a pinch: the original GLUT (GL Utility Toolkit by Mark Kilgard). freeglut works very well with PLIB applications and is maintained by many of the same people - so there is good continuity. It's perfectly possible to write PLIB programs that don't use either GLUT or freeglut - for example, you can use PLIB with SDL). ## How Portable is PLIB? VERY! All flavors of Linux are supported - on any CPU platform that supports Xfree86 and OpenGL. All flavors of Win32 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since there is little user base these days, the necessary 'project' files to build PLIB under Borland's IDE tend to get outdated. Most other UNIX-like systems (at least BSD, IRIX, Solaris, OS-X) providing they support X-windows. MacOS-X is also reasonably well supported. MacOS-9 runs everything except the joystick library. However, it's getting hard to find people to test this port - so it may have problems by the time you come to use it. 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 X, OpenGL and OSS, it should be easy to port to and may just work 'out of the box'.