But, lazy as most programmers are they went the easy way and said: "Oh well, the current spec of OpenGL it at version 1.1, how about we expose all of OpenGL-1.1 on the interfacing library's surface.
For each and every function found in the OpenGL spec you could have got a pointer to the actual thing in your OpenGL driver by that function. In the most simple form (and in hindsight this would have been the better option, because it would save so many questions like yours) this interface would have provided exactly one function: GetProcAddress. So what does OpenGL do then? Well, it requires that some part of the OS will be so generous and make it available to the program. Which makes development of an SDK manageable. That OS is Windows and that means DirectX can be written against parts of the underlying OS. DirectX has it easy, because it's designed for only one particular OS. And that makes things a little bit difficult if you want your API to be independent of an OS. However, the actual implementation of the API lives in the context of an operating system.
OpenGL itself is just a bunch of documents that describe an API that drivers provide and programs can use. (In fact, the DirectX SDK even includes documentation!)įirst of all OpenGL is not some centrally managed library and implementation (opposed to DirectX), that's why you can't download the SDK, because that's not how OpenGL works. Update: OpenGL appears to have an ideosyncratic idiom of some sort which doesn't involve having an SDK - i.e., a package of. I just want a download link to an installer that I can run, which will leave me with a reasonably up-to-date OpenGL API. StackOverflow also doesn't seem to have anything, at least not phrased in a way that I can follow. But surely I don't need to build a different version of the game I'm working on for each graphics card I'm going to be working with.
What do I need to do in order to get to that state? The OpenGL SDK page at seems to say that you're not allowed to download the SDK, and the OpenGL wiki at says that you're expected to already have it, and if you don't have it, it points you to sites where you can download graphics-card manufacturers' DLLs. The version of OpenGL included (#include ) is version 1.1, and I'd like to be working with a reasonably current version - some sort of version 3 or 4. I'm running Windows 7 with Visual Studio 2010.