¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Simple build systems, huh? Hello there. In this post we will run the “Basic 1” example from the Ogre3d wiki without installing ogre in the system. For that, I’ll assume you’re using an Unix system. First things first: grab the latest ogre version. At the time of this post, it is the 1.9 release, and you can find its repository on Bitbucket. Note: you want to download the 1.9 version using the tag download feature from Bitbucket; do not simply download the master branch. After that, extract it, create a build directory inside its directory, cd into it, and do a

cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/.lib -DOGRE_INSTALL_SAMPLES=TRUE -DOGRE_INSTALL_DOCS=TRUE -DOGRE_INSTALL_SAMPLES_SOURCE=TRUE -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

This is a pretty much standard cmake build. If your system is missing some of its dependencies, you will be warned and you should install them. Then:

make OgreDoc install

Now it is a good moment to read xkcd. The usual difference here is that we don’t do a normal make install. Why? Because we don’t want our stuff ending up on /usr/local. Instead, we want it somewhere where we have full access as a normal (non-root) user – in this example, $HOME/.lib/ogre.

Basic 1 #

Now, head to the basic 1 page of the ogre wiki and download its example. You should try to build it, but take care to change all ogre3d references from /usr/local to your new install directory ($HOME/.lib/ogre). Yeah, that’s it. Note: if the basic 1 download doesn’t come with a CMakeLists.txt file, you can download it from the Ogre CMake wiki page (clean ogre cmake project). You can use it verbatim; just put it in the same directory as the basic 1 files and – again – change any references to /usr/local to your new install directory. Also, copy the dist/ directory too (if it is missing from the Basic 1 project), I’ll add a small observation: in the case cmake complains about pkg-config, try adding this line to the top of your CMakeLists.txt (but after the project version):

set(ENV{PKG_CONFIG_PATH} "$ENV{HOME}/.lib/ogre/lib/pkgconfig:$ENV{PKG_CONFIG_PATH}")

Credits: the build style I adopted here was derived from the Ogre Arch Linux package. Thanks Sven for your excellent packaging skills! :) Update: in your plugins.cfg , do not use “$HOME” as your PluginFolder. This seems to cause issues when you run your ogre app. Instead, expand $HOME manually (in my case, to ‘/home/thiago’). This is not much portable, I know, but there must be some workaround for this I haven’t discovered yet.