Building VR-Vantage Examples, Applications, and Plug-ins

VR-Vantage includes many examples that demonstrate how to achieve common modifications to VR-Vantage applications.

It also includes project files to rebuild the entire VR-Vantage applications. This section explains how to compile and run examples as well as your own plug-ins and applications using the VR-Vantage Toolkit.

• Prerequisites for Building VR-Vantage Examples and Applications
• Define Environment Variables
• Building for Windows with Microsoft Visual Studio
• Building for Linux

• Running Applications and Examples

Prerequisites for Building VR-Vantage Examples and Applications

Before you can build an example or a custom application, you must install the software that VR-Vantage depends on and you must configure some environment variables, so that our example project files can find these prerequisites. You must do the following:

• Install the version of VR-Link used to build your version of VR-Vantage. A VR-Vantage developer's license includes a VR-Link developer's license. (VR-Link is not installed with VR-Vantage. You must run a separate installer. Please contact your MAK salesperson or support@mak.com for download links.)

• Set the environment variable MAK_VRLDIR to the full path to the VR-Link installation (for example, C:\MAK\vrlink4.0.4).

• Install the version of Qt used to build your version of VR-Vantage. You must obtain Qt from the Qt web site. Qt is available as a free download under the LGPL version 2.1 license at qt.digia.com. This version should be satisfactory for most VR-Vantage customers. If you need a Qt commercial license, you must purchase the license from Digia. If you cannot find the version required for VR-Vantage, please contact support@mak.com for assistance.

• If you are building for HLA, install a supported RTI. We recommend using the MAK High Performance RTI, but RTIs from other vendors are supported as well, as long as they comply with the appropriate versions of the HLA Standards. A VR-Vantage license does not include a license for the MAK RTI. However, the MAK RTI allows you to run federations of up to two federates without requiring a license. You can download the MAK RTI at:

  http://www.mak.com/resources/bonus-material/cat_view/16-bonus-materials/24-mak-high-performance-rti.html

  If you install an RTI, set the environment variable MAK_RTIDIR to the full path to the RTI installation (for example, C:\MAK\makRti4.1).

  Note:

  The VR-Vantage example project files look for RTI header files in a directory called "include" directly under , and look for RTI link libraries in a directory called "lib" directly under . If you are using an RTI that does not follow that directory-naming convention, you may need to change the project settings in order for the build system to find your RTI headers and libraries.

• If you plan to build for CIGI, you must download and install CIGI.

• For Windows, install a supported version of Microsoft Visual Studio. On Linux, use the default compiler.

Define Environment Variables

To build VR-Vantage applications and examples, you must define the following environment variables:

• QTDIR. Directory of your Qt installation
• MAK_VRLDIR. Directory of your VR-Link installation
• MAK_RTIDIR. Directory of your RTI installation (if you are building for HLA)
• MAK_CIGIDIR. Directory of your CIGI installation (if you are building a CIGI example).

The following is an example of defining environment variables in Linux:

  PATH=$PATH:/dev/makRti4.1/bin
  PATH=$PATH:/dev/makRti4.1/lib
  PATH=$PATH:/dev/makRti4.1/examples/bin
  export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/dev/makRti4.1/lib
  export RTI_CONFIG=/dev/makRti4.1/bin
  export RTI_RID_FILE=/dev/makRti4.1/rid.mtl
  export MAK_VRLDIR=/dev/vrlink4.0.4
  export MAK_RTIDIR=/dev/makRti4.1
  export MAK_CIGIDIR=/dev/CIGI/ccl
  export QTDIR=/dev/qt-everywhere-opensource-src-4.7.4

[Building for Windows >>]