Tools - Libraries - SDKs

Of course, my primary tool for windows development is Visual Studio .NET 2003. It is choice. If you have the means I highly recommend it. If you don’t have the means (i.e. money) then you can download the newer Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition, which is currently free. My samples do no ship with 2005 compatible versions of the .vcproj files for compilation in Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition, but the newer IDE can convert most 2003 version project files with out any problems.

For my DirectX code samples (8.1 - 9.0), you'll need to download and install the most current DirectX SDK from Microsoft's DirectX Developer Relations site. The current version I test and run on is DirectX 9.0 SDK (October 2006).

While my tutorials concerning the Torque Game Engine require only the Tutorial Base sample to run properly, I highly recommend that anyone truly interested in game development should purchase a copy of this engine so you can examine its inner workings up close and personal.

For samples that use Cg (C for graphics) to write vertex and pixel shaders, you'll need to download Cg Toolkit 1.5 from nVIDIA's Developer Relations site.

The company may have a strange name, but Whole Tomato's Visual Assist plug-in for Visual Studio is truly amazing. Once other programmers see it in action, its usage spreads like wild fire.

Curious what OpenGL extensions you card actually supports or wondering how compliant your driver is to the new OpenGL 2.0 spec? If so, glView is the tool for you!

Windows users will have to install Python 2.5.1 before any of the Python scripts will run. Python comes pre-installed on most Linux distributions, but you may have to update to the latest-and-greatest version if it's been awhile since your last OS upgrade.

In addition to installing Python 2.5.1, users wishing to running Python scripts that use the Pygame module will need to download and install Pygame 1.7.1. Just make sure you get the installer that matches up with Python 2.5.1. I downloaded the one titled, "pygame-1.7.1release.win32-py2.5.exe".
 

For samples that use SDL (Simple Dirtectmedia Layer) to write cross-platform multimedia applications, you'll need to download SDL 1.2.8 from the official SDL site. Linux users should already have these libraries installed, but it may be an older version, which needs updating.

If you're a Windows developer and you can’t seem to get used to the vi/command-line culture of Linux, I would highly recommend trying out eclipse (v3.2.1). It’s very similar to Visual Studio. Of course, eclipse, by itself, is just a generic tool framework; you’ll also need to download the CDT plug-in (v3.1.1)  if you wish to compile and debug C++ applications. Also, if you're particular Linux distribution doesn't ship with Java, you may have to download and install a Java run-time environment to run eclipse since the GUI is written in Java.

These are the downloads that I use on my Redhat WS 4.0 system. They should work for most developers working on Linux:

eclipse 3.2.1 (run-time only)
CDT Plug-in (run-time only)

If you need Java for Linux, click here and select j2re-1_4_2_12-linux-i586-rpm.bin.

A few of my Python samples deal with integrating Python and C++ together and require the Boost.Python v2 library, which can be downloaded as part of the Boost libraries v1.32. For those of you not familiar with Boost, the Boost libraries are a collection of free peer-reviewed portable C++ source libraries which have been designed to work well with the C++ Standard Library.

To run and compile any of the samples which use the NovodeX Physics SDK, you'll need to download the newest SDK (v2.2) from Ageia (requires registration).

To run or compile any of the samples which use the Tokamak Physics SDK, you'll need to download the latest SDK (v.1.21) from the Tokamak site.