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Requirements

To build Lumen itself, you'll need an Ada compiler that supports Ada 2005. One good free compiler is GNAT from AdaCore Technologies. Yes, that's all! The demos now use the "streamlined" OpenGL bindings used by Lumen internally. The library also includes some thin OpenGL bindings, though we discourage their direct use; either use the streamlined bindings (Lumen.GL, GLU, and soon to come, GLExt), or wait for our fancy "thick" Lumen.OpenGL bindings.

To link the demos, you'll need the "development" versions of the OpenGL libraries; on Debian and presumably Ubuntu, the package names are libgl1-mesa-dev and libglu1-mesa-dev. These are apparently only needed to create two crucial softlinks, but needed they are, so be sure to install them if you want to build the demos. (And trust us, you do want to build the demos!)

(NOTE: As of this writing, May 2011, Lumen does use one GNAT-specific library routine, so it is currently dependent on GNAT. It's a very trivial task being done, though, and we're working on replacing it with in-line code. No reports have come in of anyone trying to build it with another compiler, though, so it's not a priority.)

Fetching

A preliminary form of the Lumen library, and some demos for it, can be fetched using this git command:

    git clone https://github.com/karakalo/lumen.git

The repository is also replicated for historical reasons to NiEstu, so as an alternative to the above you can use this:

    git clone git://ftp.niestu.com/lumen

That will create a subdirectory named lumen containing the library, its demos, and its docs.

Building Lumen

Windows Prerequisites

In order to link the Lumen OpenGL binding on Windows, you need to have OpenGL32.lib and Gdi32.lib in your path. You can acquire these files as part of the Microsoft Windows SDK. Another option is to build them yourself from OpenGL32.dll and Gdi32.dll following the GNAT Users's Guide.

As soon as you have the file in your path, you can move on to the next step.

Compiling

You need to tell Lumen which operating system you're on. This is done by setting the scenario variable OS. It currently supports three values:

Please substitute $OS with the value representing your operating system in the following commands.

For compiling Lumen itself, do:

    cd lumen
    gnatmake -p -P lumen.gpr -XOS=$OS

That should create liblumen.a and a clutter of .ali files in the lib directory.

NOTE: If you're using the MinGW GNAT compiler from GnuAda, you might get an error message

    opengl.gpr:1:01: "project" expected

(Because the gnatmake version is not new enough to support the library project feature.) In this case, substitute gnatmake with gprbuild, which does support it.

If you want to build the optional joystick support as well (note that it is Linux-specific), this command should do it:

    gprbuild -P joy.gpr -XOS=Linux

The gprbuild command has some configuration it likes, and if that's not set up on your system yet, it may give you some static. The program gprconfig lets you set that up, choosing which compilers and languages to use for builds. Pick at least a C compiler and an Ada compiler from its menu, and save the config, after which the above command should work.

The command should add lumen-joystick.ali and liblumenjoy.a to the lib directory, which will allow you to build the joystick demos. And if you have a joystick or a game pad or something similar, you should be able to actually run them!

Building the Demos

Once you have built the library, you should be able to build the demo programs with this command:

    gnatmake -p -P demos.gpr -XOS=$OS

That should create various executables in the bin directory, which you can run according to the instructions on their respective description pages.

Lumen now also includes the first few lessons from the NeHe OpenGL tutorials, which can be built thusly:

    gnatmake -P nehe.gpr - XOS=$OS

This should create more executables in the bin directory.

Future

That's all for now, but more is coming soon!

Last Updated: 14 Dec 2011 09:32:31