Welcome to the world of modern OpenGL. Open Graphics Library (OpenGL) is an API that provides developers with various sets of functions that enable them to manipulate graphics and images. It is the core framework of most games today, whether it's mobile games for iOS or Android, or for other platforms, such as desktops and consoles as well. OpenGL just speaks for itself. Take a look at any sort of game you can think of, and it is doable in OpenGL. It's not just restricted to 3D; you can create 2D games as well. The 2D and 3D game engines are created using OpenGL, so it is more than capable of anything that you can think of. In this book, we will learn all the concepts necessary for 3D game development.
In this chapter, we'll take a look at how to set up OpenGL on Windows and Mac, using various libraries, such as GLFW, GLEW, SDL, and SFML. Our main focus for this chapter will be to understand how to download the libraries and set up OpenGL using those. While we are learning about how to set up our projects, we will also take a look at how to link these libraries to our project using absolute and relative linking.
The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
- Downloading the essential libraries
- Setting up a project on different platforms to use the libraries
- Creating an OpenGL rendering window using the libraries
