1. Introduction

Welcome to version 2.4.1 of the GLFW OpenGL framework. GLFW is a free, open source, portable framework for OpenGL application development. In short, it is a library that constitutes a powerful API for handling operating system specific tasks, such as opening an OpenGL window, reading keyboard and mouse input, creating threads, and much more. You will need some sort of interface to the OpenGL libraries. Included in this zip are modified versions of mic's OpenGL wrappers. If you are more comfortable with something else, simple include it instead. The GLFW include does not depend on it, only the examples do.

2. Using GLFW

This point is covered in the GLFW Users Guide and the GLFW Reference Manual, and I suggest that you read at least the Users Guide, since it is a good introduction to the GLFW API.

Designing and compiling programs that use GLFW is not very difficult. A few rules for successfully designing GLFW-based programs are presented in the following sections.

2.1 Include GL/glfw.e

In your program, your first included file (and sometimes the only included file) should be GL/glfw.e. This include file defines all the necessary constants, types and prototypes that are used to interact with the GLFW API. You should also include GL/gl.e and GL/glu.e or any suitable version which you are comfortable with.
 

3. Version History

v2.4.1

• Added AmigaOS support (preliminary)
• GLFW for the X Window System now works under Mac OS X
• Bugfix: [Win32] glfwWaitCond treated the timeout as milliseconds instead of seconds
• Bugfix: [X11] GLFW should now compile under IRIX v5.3
• Bugfix: [X11] GLFW should now compile with Kylix

v2.4

• Major source code rearrangement - much code is now shared between different platforms, and it should be easier to port GLFW to new platforms
• Added a Unicode keyboard text input interface (CharCallback)
• Keyboard key input is now slightly more internationalized: GLFW now uses 8-bit ISO-8859-1 encoding for keys representing printable characters (e.g. "Ö", "§", etc), as opposed to the previous 7-bit US-ASCII encoding
• Added more key constants (F13-F25, keypad '=')
• Added an enable/disable swicth for automatic event polling from glfwSwapBuffers
• [X11] Added support for sysctl for querying the number of processors in the system (if POSIX sysconf is not supported)
• Bugfix: [X11] compile.sh now works with Sun sh (and hopefully others too)
• Bugfix: [X11] compile.sh now detects the need for -ldl when dlopen is used
• Bugfix: [Win32] When closing a fullscreen window under Win 9x/NT4, the task bar icon now disappears properly
• Bugfix: [Win32] GLFW should now compile on a wider range of MSVC compilers (e.g. .NET) - Thanks Tim Little!

v2.3.2

• Removed the silly limitation of 100 threads (the thread information is now kept in a linked list)
• General source cleanup (window state is now kept in a single struct, plus some other minor changes)
• [X11] Added Solaris gethrtime() support (not tested yet), which should give an improved timer for Sun/Solaris stations
• [X11] Some fixes to the 'compile.sh' script (-O for non-gcc compilers and 'make x11-gcc' should now really force GCC)

v2.3.1

• [X11] A minimalist configuration script was added that solves the issue with glXGetProcAddressARB, and unifies all Unix/X11 Makefiles into one template Makefile (well, one for GLFW, and one for the examples)

v2.3

• Added OpenGL stereo rendering support
• Added a function for parsing the OpenGL version string (glfwGetGLVersion)
• Bugfix: [x86] Hopefully the CPU core clock dependent timer RDTSC will never be used on CPUs with variable core frequencies anymore
• Bugfix: [X11] GLFW could create stereo rendering capable windows, even if it was not requested (GLFW v2.2.x did not support selection of stereo rendering)
• Bugfix: [X11] glfwGetProcAddress returned NULL on most systems (even on those that supported glXGetProcAddressARB). Now GLFW assumes that glXGetProcAddressARB is supported on all systems, which solves the bug, but may result in compiler errors on some systems (please let me know if you have any related problems).

v2.2.3

• Bugfix: Checking for GL_SGIS_generate_mipmap is more robust
• Bugfix: glfwLoadTexture2D will now fail if no window is opened
• Bugfix: [Win32] Right shift was not detected under Win 9x/ME (it is still not as good as under NT/2K/XP, but at least you get right shifts)
• Bugfix: [X11] Visuals are now selected more accurately. For instance, glfwOpenWindow will no longer fail if you request a 24-bit color buffer if only 16-bit color visuals are avilable (which means that pong3d should work on 16-bit displays).

v2.2.2

• Bugfix: [Win32] Windows did not always get focus (this was a tough one!)
• Bugfix: [Win32] glfwGetWindowParam did not work with GLFW_ACCUM_*_BITS or GLFW_AUX_BUFFERS
• Bugfix: [X11] Linux joystick Y axis positions were reversed

v2.2.1

• [X11] Added joystick support for Linux

v2.2

• Added joystick support (only supported under Windows so far)
• Added joystick controls to pong3d.c (only 3 more lines of code)
• Added glfwOpenWindowHint() function
• It is now possible to specify a desired vertical monitor refresh rate (for fullscreen windows)
• It is now possible to request an accumulator buffer and auxiliary buffers
• Added glfwSetTime() function
• Added a GLFW conversion of the MESA/GLUT gears.c demo to the example programs
• [Win32] gdi32.dll and winmm.dll are now loaded dynamically when glfwInit() is called. This means that there is no need to link with gdi32.lib or winmm.lib when using the static version of GLFW, which should make GLFW usage more convenient.
• Bugfix: [Win32] Greatly improved keyboard input (detect left/right CTRL etc)
• Bugfix: [Win32] glfwExtensionSupported now detects all WGL extensions (e.g. WGL_ARB_pbuffer)
• Bugfix: [Win32] Mouse cursor was not re-hidden when a GLFW window was deselected and then selected again (with ALT+TAB)
• Bugfix: [X11] Minor bug in the SGI timer - and ugly (unintended) SGI timer debug info removed
• Bugfix: [X11] glfwGetDesktopMode and glfwGetVideoModes no longer give segmentation faults if no X server is available

v2.1

• Added image and texture loading capabilities (support for the TGA file format at the moment)
• Added a new example program (mipmaps.c) for showing off the automatic mipmap generation and texture loading capabilities of GLFW 2.1
• Removed the separate TGA loader (tga.c in the examples directory) since texture loading is supported natively by GLFW. Also updated the Pong3D demo to use GLFW texture loading instead of tga.c.
• Improved keyboard handling (e.g. numeric keypad keys can be detected)
• Added a new example program, keytest.c
• Changed the GLFWvidmode structure and the corresponding API functions to report pure color bits instead of the confusing (and unportable) "BPP" field
• Changed glfwSetWindowSize so that it operates in fullscreen mode too
• Added mouse wheel support under Windows (not Win95) and X11
• Added window iconification functions (glfwInconifyWindow and glfwRestoreWindow)
• Improved iconification and deactivation handling under both Windows and X11
• Made it possible to turn on/off key repeat (the default is now no key repeat)
• Added SGI hardware timer support (CLOCK_SGI_CYCLE) for improved timer resolution for SGI computers
• Added support for the free Borland C++ Builder 5.x compiler for Windows
• Made it possible to compiler GLFW as a Windows DLL using any of the supported compilers
• Some constants have changed names (e.g. GLFW_REDBITS is now called GLFW_RED_BITS)
• Updated GLFW documentation (GLFW Users Guide and GLFW Reference Manual) to reflect the changes in the API
• Bugfix: [Win32] Corrected Cygwin toplevel makefile entry
• Bugfix: [Win32] Fixed event lag bug
• Bugfix: [Win32] Fixed Radeon 8500 crash
• Bugfix: [X11] Fixed the window close bug
• Bugfix: [X11] Iconification/deactivation is now detected
• Bugfix: [X11] Non-OpenGL visuals are not listed anymore
• Bugfix: [XFree86] Undesired video mode changes are now prevented

v2.0.3

• Added precise CPU cycle based timing support (RDTSC) for x86 CPUs (under both Windows and Unix)
• Added a makefile option for building for Windows with Cygwin
• Corrected the CC for Unix/X11 makefiles (-Wall is usually not a supported flag for CC, so it was removed from the CFLAGS list)

v2.0.2

• Added a makefile option for building for X11 with 'cc' rather than 'gcc' (useful for IRIX users for instance).
• Bugfix: [Win32] Mouse coordinates are now relative to the window upper left corner, which also means that disabling the mouse cursor in windowed mode should work much better.
• Bugfix: [X11] Added a bunch of more keys that are recognized by GLFW.
• Bugfix: [X11] glfwGetNumberOfProcessors now works for IRIX (earlier versions of GLFW would not compile under IRIX).

v2.0.1

• glfwTerminate() will now be called automatically upon normal program termination (using atexit())
• Bugfix: [Win32] Buffer-swapping did not work if a window lost focus.
• Bugfix: [Win32] Top level Makefile did not work under Windows 9x.
• Bugfix: [Win32] NULL declaratoin in glfw.h was not MSVC 7.x compatible.
• Bugfix: [X11] GLFW would not build with C++ (e.g. g++).

v2.0

• GLFW is no longer a single source file, but an entire link library.
• Added multi threading support.
• Added more window control.
• New distribution layout (both Win32 and X11 version in same archive).
• Added GLFW Users Manual and GLFW Reference Manual as PDF files.
• Some bugfixes.

v1.0.2

• Improved fullscreen functionality.
• Added fullscreen support for X11.

v1.0.1

• Added support for the X Window System.
• Fixed bugs.

v1.0.0

• First release.
• Only supported Windows.

4. Files in the GLFW Euphoria Distribution

Here is a list of the files in the GLFW source distribution:

5. The author

My name is Marcus Geelnard, marcus.geelnard@home.se. Please contact me if you have any problems with GLFW, or any questions at all concerning compiling or using GLFW.

The official GLFW web site can be found here: http://glfw.sourceforge.net/. It contains the latest version of GLFW, news and other information that is useful for OpenGL development.

The Euphoria wrapper was created by Elliott Sales de Andrade, quantum_analst@hotmail.com

6. Acknowledgements

GLFW would not be what it is today without the help from:

• Keith Bauer, for his invaluable help with porting GLFW to Mac OS X (presently X11 only, but soon native Carbon too), and for his many ideas.
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• Ozzy @
• Orkysquad, for his dedication to GLFW, for debugging my source, and for his valuable experience with game development.
  
  
• Jeff Molofee, the author of the excellent OpenGL tutorials at NeHe Productions. Much of the Windows code of GLFW was originally based on Jeff's code.
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• Douglas C. Schmidt and Irfan Pyarali, for their excellent article Strategies for Implementing POSIX Condition Variables on Win32, which is the basis for the Win32 condition variable implementation in GLFW.
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• Gerald Franz, who made GLFW compile under IRIX, and supplied patches for the X11 keyboard translation routine.
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• Dmitri Shuralyov, for bug reports and testing.
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• Paul R. Deppe, who helped me with Cygwin support, and made an adaption of PLIB so that it can use GLFW (instead of GLUT).
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• Jarrod Davis, for the Delphi port of GLFW.
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• Toni Jovanoski, for helping me with the MASM32 port of GLFW, and supplying the example program and fixed OpenGL & GLU bindings for MASM32.
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• www.opengl.org, and all the people on the discussion forums there that have provided help during the development of GLFW.
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• The MSDN Online Linrary, which was used extensively for Windows development.
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• All the feedback from GLFW users - thank you!.