A day or two ago, Jason Olson finally got word that he landed his dream job at Microsoft, as he has already blogged about it, I would like to say a big congratulations to him and I wish you the best of luck. You know me, I didn't have a whole lot of faith in Microsoft for a most of my career being an ex Sun employee and mostly a unix/java guy, Boy was I relieved to find out that Microsoft finally made a good decision when they hired you!!! I expect to hear from you in a big way in the future and it's been a pleasure working with you. Congratualations!
So much has been going on for me @ work I have hardly had anytime to flush out eggblast. I don't think Im going to make the dead line with anything signifiant so Im going to scope down to a simpler concept that I will have to discover while drinking coffee and staying up late this weekend.
I have,however, successfully built and run the Ogre3d engine and accompanying demo apps in visual c++ express. It is possible to do!.. Im going to write a couple Ogre3d tutorials that explain ohw to get configured using VC++ Xpress...But just so I can remember the steps until then, they are as follows:
All you need to do is:
- Download the ogre3d source Ogre3d Source
- Download the dependencies package Dependancies for Win32
- Extract the dependencies zip file to the src root
- (when you unpack the src it creates a directory structure that includes a directory called "ogrenew", extract the dependencies zip beneath this directory, the projects have relative pointers to this location)
- Ensure you have the DirectX 9 SDK (Im using the april release) if not download this as well.
- Download CEGui src (more to come on this, it is not required for ogre3d, but some of the demo applications do use it and it is also an awsome gui library)
- Launch VC++ Xpress
- Add the DirectX sdk includes to your default includes path under Tools->Options->Projects & Solutions->V++ Directories: Select "Include files" from the drop down list and add the path to the x86 includes directory of the sdk (if installed in the default location this would be \Program Files\Microsoft DirectX SDK(April 2006)\Include)
- Open the Vc8.0 solution, this will prompt for a conversion to VC++Express, allow the conversion
All the projects need to be linked to user32.lib, gdi32.lib...for some reason in VC++ Express the only default windows library is kernal32, I seem to remember it being different at some point in the past however its been a little while. So for each project follow the following steps:
- right-click on the project within the solution explorer
- select properties.
- In the properties dialog select the Linker options and add "user32.lib gdi32.lib" to the "Additional Dependencies" list.
- Click apply
build away!!.
I first attempted to use a prebuilt binaries only to find out that there was runtime compatibility issues with the version of msvcrt71, I believe the pre-builts actually use 70 which causes some issues with what looked like buffer allocation, Im not 100% positive on that, I abandoned ship pretty quick and just built the source.