1. Window

Create Project

Create am empty visual C++ project in Visual Studio(Get Visual Studio).

Add GLFW

To write a game engine, we start with the window at first.

OpenGL doesn’t concern about the management of windows and inputs. Therefor we use GLFW to deal with it.

GLFW is an Open Source, multi-platform library for OpenGL, which provides a simple API for creating window and receiving input.

Following the steps to setup GLFW library.

add dependencies

Create a “Dependencies” directory in the root folder of the project.

Download GLFW and put the library in “Dependencies”.

include

Add the include directory in the property.

library

Add the library directory in the property.

Main function

Create a main.cpp in the root directory.

#include <iostream>
#include <GLFW/glfw3.h>

int main()
{
    if(!glwInit())
      std::cout << "Failed the initialize GLFW" << std::endl;
    else
      std::cout << "Success!" << std::endl;

    system("PAUSE");
    return 0;
}

Run it to see if the GLFW works as we expect.

If it succeed, we can implement our first window.

#include <iostream>
#include <GLFW/glfw3.h>

int main()
{
  if (!glfwInit())
    return 1;

  //create a window with 800px width and 600px height, name it as what you like
  GLFWwindow *window = glfwCreateWindow(800, 600, "MyEngine", NULL, NULL);

  if (!window)
  {
    std::cout << "Failed to initialize GLFW " << std::endl;
    return 1;
  }
  glfwMakeContextCurrent(window);
  while (!glfwWindowShouldClose(window))
  {
      glfwPollEvents();
      glfwSwapBuffers(window);
  }
  glfwTerminate();
  system("PAUSE");
  return 0;
}

Now you should see a window.

In the next chapter we are going to include the OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library and draw our first triangle.