Tutorial 1         How to setup and compile Ogre

How to setup and compile Ogre

This tutorial will cover the basic setup and compilation of Ogre for the rest of the Tutorials. Directory Setup For these Tutorials we will be creating our own directory structure. Create the following directories using DOS or Windows explorer.

  • C:\OgreTutorials
  • C:\OgreTutorials\Bin\Debug
  • C:\OgreTutorials\Bin\Release
  • C:\OgreTutorials\Bin\Media
  • C:\OgreTutorials\Common

Getting Ogre

There are three ways you can get Ogre.

  1. Download a stable version of Ogre's source code from here.
  2. Download a stable version of Ogre as a prebuilt sdk from here.
  3. Download Ogre directly from CVS. The instructions for doing this are found at here.


After downloading Ogre, you will need to also download the a precompiled dependencies package. These are found
here. There are seperate downloads for Visual C++ 2003, 2005, 2008, Code::Blocks/MingW and OSX. You only need the one which matches the compiler you are using.

Compiling Ogre

If you downloaded a ZIP you can now unzip Ogre into our directory. If you used CVS and put it someplace else, move or copy the OgreNew directory to ours. In the end you should have C:\OgreTutorials\OgreNew. Now unzip the dependencies into C:\OgreTutorials. If it was done right, there now should be a directory at C:\OgreTutorials\OgreNew\Dependencies.

Using VC++, Open up the Ogre solution found in C:\OgreTutorials\OgreNew. If everything was setup properly, at this time you should be able to compile the whole workspace in debug and release modes. Once compiled, you can go to C:\OgreTutorials\OgreNew\Samples\common\bin\debug or C:\OgreTutorials\OgreNew\Samples\common\bin\release and you will find a whole load of demo executables. Run them, look though them.

The last part of this tutorial is copying the appropriate files for the rest of the tutorials. Using Windows explorer we need to copy the DLLs and Plugins.cfg from C:\OgreTutorials\OgreNew\Samples\common\bin\debug to C:\OgreTutorials\bin\debug And C:\OgreTutorials\OgreNew\Samples\common\bin\release to C:\OgreTutorials\bin\release.

Using file explorer copy the following files to C:\OgreTutorials\Common

  • C:\OgreTutorials\OgreNew\Samples\Common\Include\ExampleApplication.h
  • C:\OgreTutorials\OgreNew\Samples\Common\Include\ExampleFrameListener.h


Using file explorer copy the DLLs from C:\OgreTutorials\Ogrenew\dependancies\Devil\libs to C:\OgreTutorials\bin\debug.

Now open the file C:\OgreTutorials\bin\debug\ogre.cfg in a text editor, and change the option "Full Screen" to have the value "No". This wil make it easier to debug programs.

Now we can step ahead to Tutorial 2