Box2D Forums

Alas, not being on Windows (I have XP at home, but I live on my laptop, which is a Mac), I haven't actually gotten to run the testbed project yet. At some point I will set it up in XCode, but while this project is still young it seems like a good time to suggest eventually setting up some sort of cross-platform solution like CMake - Bullet uses that, and in my opinion it results in just about the most painless project setup that I've seen yet (from the point of view of an end user), at least for OSX and Linux (yeah, I guess everyone on Windows is pretty safely locked into Microsoft's suite...).

I've never actually set up a CMake project before, but I don't think it should be that difficult - the only thing I'm not sure of is how interoperable the graphics/windowing libraries are between OSes.

CMake looks good. I'll put it on the ever growing TODO list. I'll probably need some assistance with this since I only run Windows.

The test-bed should be cross platform since it's built on glut.

Okay, first I'll see if I can get an XCode project running (assuming nobody else has already done this?), and then I'll take a look at what it would take to put some CMake scripts together. At the moment I'm still having some issues (Apple decided to make using other OpenGL code pretty irritating by trivially altering some naming things, and malloc.h for whatever reason doesn't want to work, had to use stdlib.h), but I'll get there eventually. Turns out there's a Ruby script at http://www.eskilson.se/vcproj2cmake.rb that will turn a VC project into a CMake one, I'm going to fiddle with it and see if I can get it to work right (there are a few issues with the script at the moment).

Has anyone gotten things running on Linux? Plain old Unix makefiles would probably satisfy at least the most basic cross-platform needs...

Just an update: I just now got Box2D to compile under XCode for the first time. Runs mostly right, though a couple of the examples don't do anything except spit out garbage text (I'm tracking that down, I think it has more to do with the drawing code than with the physics, but I'm not sure at the moment). Turns out it's a bit more difficult than I thought to get working, and I'm not sure that everything will be fixed by just having a good build script. I'm not too used to XCode, but apparently it prefers to use Frameworks that are installed for all of OS X over the usual linking process (or at least that's the only way I could make it work), so part of the effort involved actually going out and downloading a GLUI framework package and importing it by hand into the project. I'm going to see if I can figure out how to get things running straight from the Box2D source download; if not, there may need to be some additional files included to make this work on Mac.

Then again, if I'm the only one here on a Mac, and I already have the project running, maybe it's not worth the effort?

On another note, just so that I'm clear (more related to the GLUI issue): is it okay to include GPL/LGPL code with a project that's under zlib?

Thanks for looking at this. It would be a shame if you had to do anything extraordinary to get the test-bed to run on the Mac.

GLUI is LGPL, which doesn't require Box2D to be LGPL. FreeGLUT appears to be an MIT license, which is permissive.

If GLUI was GPL, then I couldn't use it.