Prepare GLEW
OpenGL is organized around a set of base functions and an extension mechanism
used to support new functionality as technologies advance. Modern versions of
openGL, such as those found in version 4+ as we use in this class, require
identifying the extensions available on the GPU. There are commands built into
core openGL for doing this, but they involve several rather convoluted lines of
code that would need to be performed for each modern command used. Therefore, it
has become standard practice to use an extension library to take care of these
details, and to make modern openGL commands available to the programmer directly.
A commonly used library is OpenGL Extension Wrangler (GLEW). We recommend GLEW
for this class. Other options such as Glee, GLLoader, GL3W and GLAD are also
available. In particular, GL3W and GLAD are automately updated. But they require
that Python be installed.
You can download and uncompress the 64-bit binaries of GLEW (glew-2.1.0-win32.zip)
at glew.sourceforge.net. The items in particular we will need to obtain are:
* glew32.lib (found in the "lib/Release/x64" folder). The name includes "32" but
currently these are still the correct files for 64-bit installation
* glew32.dll (found in the "bin/Release/x64" folder)
* the GL folder (found in the "include" folder), which includes several header
files