PLIB 1.8.5 RC1 review

PLIB project includes sound effects, music, a complete 3D engine, font rendering, a simple Windowing library, a game scripting langua

License: LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License) File size: 775K Developer: Steve Baker

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PLIB project includes sound effects, music, a complete 3D engine, font rendering, a simple Windowing library, a game scripting language, a GUI, networking, 3D math library and a collection of handy utility functions.

All are 100% portable across nearly all modern computing platforms. What's more, it's all available on line - and completely free. Each library component is fairly independent of the others - so if you want to use SDL, GTK, GLUT, or FLTK instead of PLIB's 'PW' windowing library, you can.

Requirements:
The PLIB team works hard to minimise our dependance on other libraries to make it easy for end-users to install application software without having to visit dozens of web sites to collect the libraries they need.

3D/2D Graphics: OpenGL. If you aren't already set up to run OpenGL, you should check:
- The OpenGL ARB site.
- Or download Mesa (which is an excellent OpenGL clone by Brian Paul).
- If you are a Linux user, you may wish to check the Linux3D Site.
- If you are a Windoze or Macintosh user, you should have had a copy of OpenGL delivered with your operating system.
Windowing: From version 1.8.0, PLIB itself is completely independent of any other windowing library. However, some of the demo and example programs use freeglut (or at a pinch: the original GLUT (GL Utility Toolkit by Mark Kilgard). freeglut works very well with PLIB applications and is maintained by many of the same people - so there is good continuity. It's perfectly possible to write PLIB programs that don't use either GLUT or freeglut - for example, you can use PLIB with SDL).

What's New in This Release:
Miscelaneous bug fixes