Running OpenGL without installing?

Question

I am writing an OpenGL based game. It includes just these two libraries: glew, glfw3. In order to run it the user must obviously have OpenGL installed, an assumption which I'd like to bypass. I've gathered all the appropriate binaries inside the game directory and tried linking to these libraries locally but the compiler claims undefined reference to all their functions. Am I doing something wrong or is it just impossible? I'm using Windows but it fails on Linux for the same reason.

Answer 1

OpenGL is not a library you install, it's an API that's implemented as part of the driver. Your compiler complaining about symbols not resolving is completely unrelated to the situation on the end user's computer. And in your case it simply sounds that you did not tell the compiler / linker which libraries and API interfaces to link into your program binary; your compiler is hence complaining, that some of the internal references don't redolve.

So here it goes: OpenGL is not something you ship with your program, it's part of the graphics drivers and your program must use whatever OpenGL version is installed on the user's machine. For this you dynamically link against libGL.so by passing the compiler-linker option -lGL .

GLEW is a helper library that post-loads dynamically all OpenGL functions not found in the system OpenGL ABI, which hence are not exported through the public symbol table of libGL.so . Rather they're to be loaded dynamically using glXGetProcAddress – a rather tedious task. Be advised that GLEW has some serious issues when it comes to OpenGL-3 and later core profiles.

GLFW is a simplistic framework library for setting up a window having an OpenGL context.

GLEW and GLFW are safe to link statically with your program, and I recommend you do that. Instead of using the -l… flag, add libGLEW.a and libGLFW.a to the list of source files / compilation units to be linked.