How do you install GLUT and OpenGL in Visual Studio 2012?

Question

I just installed Visual Studio 2012 today, and I was wondering how can you install GLUT and OpenGL on the platform?

Answer 1

OpenGL should be present already - it will probably be Freeglut / GLUT that is missing.

GLUT is very dated now and not actively supported - so you should certainly be using Freeglut instead. You won't have to change your code at all, and a few additional features become available.

You'll find pre-packaged sets of files from here: http://freeglut.sourceforge.net/index.php#download If you don't see the "lib" folder, it's because you didn't download the pre-packaged set. "Martin Payne's Windows binaries" is posted at above link and works on Windows 8.1 with Visual Studio 2013 at the time of this writing.

When you download these you'll find that the Freeglut folder has three subfolders: - bin folder: this contains the dll files for runtime - include: the header files for compilation - lib: contains library files for compilation/linking

Installation instructions usually suggest moving these files into the visual studio folder and the Windows system folder: It is best to avoid doing this as it makes your project less portable, and makes it much more difficult if you ever need to change which version of the library you are using (old projects might suddenly stop working, etc.)

Instead (apologies for any inconsistencies, I'm basing these instructions on VS2010)... - put the freeglut folder somewhere else, e.g. C:dev - Open your project in Visual Studio - Open project properties - There should be a tab for VC++ Directories, here you should add the appropriate include and lib folders, e.g.: C:devfreeglutinclude and C:devfreeglutlib - (Almost) Final step is to ensure that the opengl lib file is actually linked during compilation. Still in project properties, expand the linker menu, and open the input tab. For Additional Dependencies add opengl32.lib (you would assume that this would be linked automatically just by adding the include GL/gl.h to your project, but for some reason this doesn't seem to be the case)

At this stage your project should compile OK. To actually run it, you also need to copy the freeglut.dll files into your project folder