P-155 “Phoenix” Engine Update 1: OpenGL Context and support libraries

I have successfully created an OpenGL context and installed and linked most of the libraries that I will need for the next part of this project.

As I said, I am using OpenGL for rendering, and GLFW and GLEW for the support libraries. I have also included the glm math library.

My intention is to make a seamless virtual universe, so I had to find some way of representing numerical (decimal) values greater than 64 bits. I thought that this would be easy, but it turns out there are very few libraries that were suitable for my purposes.
The most common seems to be GMP, although this is designed for linux. There are windows versions, MPIR, and MPFR, but these are either GPL or commercial.

Boost also has support for arbitrary precision mathematics, but it is a huge library. It’s something I have always wanted to play around with, and many of it’s other features, such as multithreading and networking, would have also been useful, it it’s just too inefficient to include a library of that size just for a few features, especially in a games engine. In addition, Boost doesn’t seem to have a great reputation for use in games engines, for a number of reasons.

I eventually found ttmath. This is a very small, very clean bignum library for c++. It is very easy to work with, and is free for commercial and non-commercial use (BSD Licence). This makes it perfect for my purposes.

The next step is to begin experimenting with creating objects in a scene with very large view distances.