[Workaphobia]

Technically this is a Digital Mars compiler question and not a D one, but no one's responded on their newsgroup and I'm getting kind of impatient

I'm interested in learning OpenGL for D. I figured I should crawl before I walk though, so I started with some C examples using DMC. I found that they worked fine in MSVC5 but wouldn't link under optlink because of this COFF vs OMF format war thing.

I've tried using both Borland's coff2omf and implib to create OMF files for opengl32.lib, glu32.lib, and glut32.lib, but after either method the resulting libraries were less than half as large and missing many entries. Can anyone here tell me how they got OpenGL to work under optlink, or drop me a url to someplace that has the libraries available in OMF?

I haven't tried it yet in dmd but I'm assuming since it uses the same backend compiler and linker I'll get the same problem.
_________________
"Nifty News Fifty: When news breaks, we give you the pieces."

[jcc7]

Since I don't really know C/C++ and I haven't worked with DMC, I can't answer your specific question.

But I would like to go out on a limb and suggest another way of reaching your goal of using "learning OpenGL for D". Have you considered playing around with the code for existing D projects that uses OpenGL? I think the best way to learn D is to use D. Sure, DMC and DMD share a linker and some guts, but DMD is more exciting and probably has more active newsgroups.

Here at dsource, several projects involve (or will involve) OpenGL to some extent.

unDig
http://badmama.com.au/~anderson/

[Workaphobia]

Oh yes, I agree about D being more exciting and having a more active community, and I wouldn't be interested in DMC were it not the only console C++ compiler I have (though I know that could be remedied). More importantly, it's not like there are any D tutorials that specifically relate to opengl (at least to my knowledge), while there are plenty for C.

I tried a while back to use Dig - or maybe it was another project, whichever one it was that was created by Burton Radons. Unfortunately I came across it after some major spec changes rendered it obsolete and the project fell into neglect. It didn't help at all that I couldn't compile the updated version - not because of some syntax problems, but because the self-compile command line was too long for windows 98 to handle, and required xp. At that point I just gave up on using any D GUI until someone releases a stable, well-maintained, easy to compile library.

These current projects for D, do they include everything necessary for opengl in their own libraries or do they need opengl32.lib on top?

I'm really not experienced enough to dissect a real project in any language and learn it from the source - excluding something trivial like finding a function overload.
_________________
"Nifty News Fifty: When news breaks, we give you the pieces."

[jcc7]

[Workaphobia]

I haven't tried undig yet, mostly because the old dig turned me against D GUIs for a while. If I ever get the hang of OpenGL the proper C++ way, I may use such tools rather than continue to do things the hard way - I just want to know the way things are really done before I get some utility to make things easy for me.

I get a link error. Without the libraries in the lib folder, it's obviously a missing library error. When I add the libraries as downloaded and unmodified, I get a invalid library error. When using implib (Borland's, not DMC's since I don't have the commercial CD version), the file is smaller and I get a couple dozen unresolved external symbol errors. Roughly the same thing happens with coff2omf. I'm not really sure how impdef would help - there were no def files in the opengl zip I downloaded, unless I'm missing something.

But people have gotten this to work with both DMC and Borland, and I want to know how. Since I'm using the same utility as Borland users, you'd think the library output would be the same as theirs - Outside of the errors specific to optlink, it's very obvious that something's wrong before attempting to compile, just judging by the file size. It can't possibly be just me. I hope.
_________________
"Nifty News Fifty: When news breaks, we give you the pieces."

[jcc7]

[Workaphobia]

I didn't know borland and dmc weren't compatible, since they both use OMF. I just tried DMC's implib and it produced the same results - the libs were only slightly larger than those created with Borland's tool. What would be the point of me creating a def file though? Wouldn't I need the file from someplace else?

[edit] Oh and the error isn't Unresolved external symbol, it's Symbol undefined, if there's a difference... Which there probably isn't. *shrug*
_________________
"Nifty News Fifty: When news breaks, we give you the pieces."

[jcc7]

[Workaphobia]

Just one of these:

[jcc7]

[Workaphobia]

[jcc7]

[Workaphobia]

Excuse me, I need to get something off my chest.


YAHHHHHHHHOOOOO!

It compiles! I had a few missing linked import errors of some sort, due to typos in my defs, but once I got that out of the way I was able to open the exe and see the multicolored cube rotate in front of the camera. It actually works!

Now I'm betting since this particular program could not have used all the functions in openGL, that there will be plenty of other entries I'll have to add along the way to my .def file. So long as this doesn't fall apart again, I don't mind doing that. Time to experiment, I guess.

Thanks for all your help. I posted this question on both the DMC newsgroup and the opengl.org forums, and haven't gotten more than one reply from either.

[edit] By the way, my final library sizes were all below 5 kilobytes. Makes me really wonder what was in the original libraries if all you need is the dlls.
_________________
"Nifty News Fifty: When news breaks, we give you the pieces."

[jcc7]

[JJR]

I don't really understand why all this was necessary with dmc. dmc includes all the opengl implibs in the zip file to begin with. There should be no need to make a "def" file at all. Just comple with dmc and and link with the appropriate libs.

The only reason that you would want to implib opengl32.dll and such is if you want to work with a more recent opengl dll with more listed functions (this can happen if you update your headers for a more recent opengl version). Since there's slight conversion details necessary to make things work, there are actually a couple of options for doing this (if you search the digitalmars C++ newsgroup, you'll probably see quite a few people who have been asking about opengl; this goes way back):

1) use the openwatcom linker which supports both OMF and COFF (this simplifies the format issues) right here. These great tools are provided by Christof Meerwald, by the way, (borrowed from the openwatcom project) and likely something you will want to add to your dmc distribution eventually anyway.

or 2) use a modified version of implib provided by Jan Knepper so that compatible symbols will be generated (I can't remember how this is done or where the link is to Jan's modified version, but just do a search on C++ or C++.windows.32-bits newsgroups on implib and you should get the link)

Otherwise you should just link with the provided opengl32.lib, glaux.lib and glu32.lib. If you do link with all 3 libs, you shouldn't have any undefined symbols.

Note, I played with opengl and dmc a little over a year ago and ran into some troubles too, but it had more to do with forgetting to include all the necessary libs (well that and a corrupt opengl32.lib). I got it working eventually, though.

Even though it looks like you got things working, I just wanted to stress that you shouldn't have to go to so much trouble getting it to work if it's just a basic opengl project using basic opengl features.

Later,

John