Sunday, December 3, 2006

Setting Up SDL for Eclipse on Mac OS X

I got an email from someone who was having trouble setting up SDL on Eclipse. I have never used Eclipse so I could not provide him much help. He eventually found a solution and emailed it to me so I could share it with you.

There are four things you have to do to get SDL working with Eclipse on Mac OS X in addition to what I outlined in my SDL tutorial. First, you must copy the files SDLMain.h and SDLMain.m to the same directory as your SDL program. My interpretation of this statement is if you create an Eclipse project and add your source code files to the project folder, you must also add SDLMain.h and SDLMain.m to the project folder.

Second, you must add the directory where your SDL headers reside to the Directories setting for the GCC C++ compiler. Your headers most likely reside in the following directory:

/Library/Frameworks/SDL.framework/Headers

Third, you must add linker flags for the Cocoa and SDL frameworks as well as the path to the SDLMain.m file.

-framework Cocoa
-framework SDL
/Path/To/YourProject/SDLMain.m

Fourth, you must change the following line of code in SDLMain.m:

#import "SDL.h"

to the following:

#include SDL/SDL.h

Put less than and greater than signs around the SDL/SDL.h. For some reason I can't get those characters to show up in the blog.