This chapter explains how you obtain, install and compile the Cal3D library. You can find Cal3D on the official website at http://gna.org/projects/cal3d/. Read the release notes in the download section for the latest information about the different packages and dependencies. In order to successfully compile and use the Cal3D library, you need the following programs: A C++ compiler with decent STL support. Doxygen if you want to build the &apiref; from the sourcecode comments. The DocBook tools if you want to build this User's Guide from scratch. The setup was tested on most GNU/Linux distributions and native packages exist for most of them. It also works on all known windows or macos flavors. Note that you will need additional programs and libraries to compile and run the tools and demos from the Cal3D project. See their documentation for details. This section is very important for a successful installation of Cal3D, so follow the steps carefully. Make sure you unpack all the different Cal3D packages into the same directory. It is highly recommended that you create a separate directory for this. The names of all the Cal3D packages are tagged with their version number. After unpacking the Cal3D library package, you have to strip the version number from the directory name. As example, unpacking Cal3D version 0.11 will result in a directory named cal3d-0.11 and should be renamed to cal3d. A symbolic link under *nix systems works too. All the packages depending on the Cal3D library fail to compile if this is not properly done! The same procedure needs to be done for the example data package. As example, rename cal3d_data-0.11 to cal3d_data. All the other package names do not need to be stripified, but you are free to do so. At the end, you should have a directory structure like this: my_separate_cal3d_directory/ cal3d/ cal3d_cally-2.0/ cal3d_data/ cal3d_exporter-0.3/ cal3d_miniviewer-0.9/ ... The Cal3D project comes with automake/autoconf scripts and MS Visual C++ for easy compilation. Read the compile instructions for your specific development environment below. Change to the cal3d directory and execute the following commands in the shell: ./configure make This should build the Cal3D library without any warning or error. Start up MS Visual C++ and execute the following steps: Open the cal3d.dsw workspace file. Execute Build -> Rebuild all. This should build the Cal3D library without any warning or error in the Release Configuration. The STL warnings that appear while compiling the Debug Configuration can be ignored.