So here I am, doing what I usually do on my game. You get two guesses:
1. Adding features
2. Screwing around with compiler settings, trying to get third party libraries to work
If you guessed 1, you haven’t read any other posts on this blog.
So this time it’s Open AL. Back with version 1.0 I got it working quickly and with a minimum of hassle. I updated to 1.1 it’s like they purposely made it hard to compile. ONE API has FIVE projects, two of which are DLLs and 3 of which are static libraries. There’s no documentation on why there are 5 projects or what they do but who needs it when you have such descriptive names as “ALc”, “ALu”, and “ALut”?
After like an hour I got the damn thing compiling to a library, only to find out that it crashes every time I run it somewhere in assembly code. So I give up on libraries and just try to compile the source. Burn past about 100 warnings, get it compiling, and still crash in the same spot.
I’m still working on it. I’m just happy there is only one more third party library to deal with: Newton Physics. Hopefully that won’t be too bad. I wish more people took a lesson from the Irrlicht author and actually designed libraries in a meaningful robust fashion and include documentation.