just a quick, embarassing question that ill prolly get trash talked. Where do I get the open gl libraries? thank you for any help, and any tips for somebody new to gl.
There’s not a lot of trash talking here it’s a friendly forum for on topic stuff.
OpenGL development requires several components.
The header files you need for function prototypes and token definitions etc. the the driver files either generic from MS of from the manufacturer including the dll with exported entry points.
You need the header files gl.h and glext.h from this site or from the SDK from any manufacturer.
Because of the way OpenGL uses wglGetProcAddress you can use any of the libs and dll from windows that ships with some versions of the os or compilers like visual studio or any library from the SDK of any manufacturer like NVIDIA or ATI. The implementation and dlls are updated with every driver release from any hardware manufacturer.
So, my advice would be to figure out what card you have, and grab the SDK from that manufacturer, hopefully that’ll be NVIDIA or ATI. You can then write and compile OpenGL. Just remember that the contents of glext.h will be proprietary so be careful how you detect and use tokens. You can get a common header from this site (not sure how up to date it is) or download one of the extension management libraries like glew or glee to get you started with the fancier stuff.
that was really helpful thanks!