Wings 3D: User Manual/Installation

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Windows

This User's Manual was written to the Windows version of Wings3D, however the concepts and commands discussed herein should be generally applicable to all platforms to the best of my knowledge. An effort will be made to explain where operations differ via platform. If you find differences that are not addressed please forward that information to the author so that the manual can be updated appropriately. Send changes, additions and corrections to jstro anti spam swbell .net. feel free to join and help making Wings 3D User Manual as perfect as possible.

Wings3D is written in the Erlang programming language, however there is no need for you to download the Erlang binaries since the ones needed for Wings are compiled right into the Wings distribution. If you want to become a Wings developer you will need to download the full Erlang distribution. You can download both the Erlang source and runtime libraries and Wings3D binaries for Windows from the Wings home page: http://www.wings3d.com/

These binaries will work for all versions of Windows. The Wings binaries are small, approximately 3.5 MB. The Wings download is a self extracting installer, simply double click on it to install Wings. When a new version of Wings becomes available, simply download the new binaries for Wings and reinstall it right over the old installation. You may also want to download the sample plug-ins located at the same site. These should be installed in your Wings plug-ins directory, which was created when you installed Wings. They are useful for developers to examine who are considering writing their own plug-ins. A list of plugins available can be found in Plugins chapter of this manual.

Quick Tip: Plugins don’t work with all versions of Wings3D. Plugins have to be programmed to work with each version of wings. Because of the speed in which Wings3D is updated you may find that a plugin only works with a particular update. Because of this check the wings version you downloaded against the versions the plugin will work with. Tip by Jason McAlpin

Linux

Binaries for Linux are available for download at http://www.wings3d.com. Installation is pretty straightforward.

Decompress the installation file from the archive wings-0.XXX-linux.run.gz:

   $ gzip -d wings-0.XXX-linux.run.gz

And install it:

   $ ./wings-0.XXX-linux.run

A directory with the name wings-0.XXX will be created in your home directory. In order to run Wings3d:

   $~/wings-0.XXX/wings

Of course you can still download the Erlang and Wings source and build your own. To do so y must download the source code package for both as found at the Sourceforge® project page a compile them.

                              http://www.erlang.org/download.html

The system requirements in order to run Wings3D are;

   1) a computer and operating system that can run Erlang/OTP, and
   2) OpenGL®/Mesa drivers. You will need the following components to run Wings:
       Erlang/OTP,
       SDL,
       ESDL,
       Wings3D.

Download all four packages and compile them in this order; Erlang/OTP, SDL, ESDL, and th Wings itself last. Here are the complete build instructions for Wings (from the README), assuming that the OT SDL and ESDL have been built. 1) Set the environment variable ESDL_PATH to the root of your ESDL installation. Example:

      # If you use bash or ksh.
       export ESDL_PATH=/ldisk/bjorn/esdl-0.9.0906
      # If you use csh or tcsh.
       setenv ESDL_PATH /ldisk/bjorn/esdl-0.9.0906

2) Run a GNU compatible `make'. Once Wings has been installed you can start Wings like this:

       erl -pa $ESDL_PATH/ebin MY_WINGS_PATH/ebin -run wings_start start_halt

where you should substitute MY_WINGS_PATH with the actual path to your Wings directory. Example:

       Erl -pa $ESDL_PATH/ebin /ldisk/bjorn/wings/ebin -run wings_start start_halt

Solaris

The Solaris® installation instructions are the same as for Linux®.

Mac

The Mac installation requires OS X 10.2 or higher. There is no need to install Erlang since everything is already compiled into the application. Download and Open the .dmg (disk image) file and copy the enclosed file to your application directory. It is ready to use. Wings also runs under Windows emulation via Virtual PC.