How do I link OpenSceneGraph libraries and includes to Visual Studio properly?

Question

I am trying to compile and build the first basic example from the OSG 3.0 Beginner's Guide (Rui Wang, Xuelei Qian) run on Windows 10 (Build 18363) with Visual Studio Community 19 (16.7.3). The code looks like this:

#include <osgDBd/ReadFile>
#include <osgViewerd/Viewer> //the "d" is supposed to be there when in Debug solution configuration

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
    osgViewer::Viewer viewer;
    viewer.setSceneData(osgDB::readNodeFile("cessna.osg"));
    return viewer.run();
}

But the error messages are:

Error (active)  E1696   cannot open source file "osgDBd/ReadFile"
Error (active)  E1696   cannot open source file "osgViewerd/Viewer"
Error   C1083   Cannot open include file: 'osgDBd/ReadFile': No such file or directory

So I rechecked my solution properties, which I had set up following OSG's online documentation "compiling with visual studio" (Linker, C++ properties, ...), as well as my environment variables in Windows OS. The recommended cmd commands, should something be out of order, didn't help either. (I deemed it less cluttered leaving out all those screenshots, but I can of course upload them if wished)

I also compared my settings to this answer: How to add additional libraries to Visual Studio project? , which I thought same.

I should add, that I built OSG on a separate drive than Visual Studio or Windows, but I believed setting the environment variables properly should be ok.

Help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

Have you set %OSG_ROOT% ?

I'm not sure what is in the guide, but my typical installation is to set Windows environment variable OSG_ROOT to the main OpenSceneGraph folder in my Program Files (x86), then to add $(OSG_ROOT)\include to my additional include folders and $(OSG_ROOT)\lib to my additional library folders.

Also, it looks like the example you are using has a "d" added to the folder names - should just be osgDB/ReadFile and osgViewer/Viewer for the Release versions - maybe they wanted you to build the debug libraries and add such folders for your includes? I get having a separate lib and bin but I don't know why they would want a separate include folder for Debug vs. Release, so my suggestion would be to remove the d from the include statements, e.g. osgDBd --> osgDB, osgViewerd --> osgViewer, etc.

Unfortunately, the Example applications in the OSG Solution reference the local build folders, not the installed folders, so will not serve as an example of how to reference OSG from its installed location. However, if you are ok building from the local build folder, you could just use the project settings from one of the Examples.