Prerequisites

C++

You need a Standard-compliant C++ compiler to build osgNV.

While the "native" development environment is Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003, osgNV is continuously tested under Linux with the gcc 3.3 compiler. Support for older compilers like gcc 2.9x and VC6 is usually weaker and may be broken over several CVS updates, although the author tries to restore compatibiliy with such compilers before each new release.

OpenSceneGraph

osgNV is an add-on for OpenSceneGraph rather than a stand-alone library, so you need to have OpenSceneGraph correctly installed on your system before you can compile osgNV. Each release of osgNV has been tested against the latest version of OpenSceneGraph available at the time. When you download osgNV make sure you have the version of OpenSceneGraph that is reported in the release notes. Newer versions are not always backward compatible. If you are keeping osgNV up-to-date through tarballs or CVS, then you should keep OSG up-to-date as well. To learn more about OpenSceneGraph please visit http://www.openscenegraph.org.

The nvparse library

If you want to compile the osgNVParse module (included by default) then you need our modified version of nvparse (see the Download page). Please note that the standard version of nvparse available from nVIDIA won't work with osgNV. If you don't need support for parsing register combiner and texture shader definitions you can safely exclude the osgNVParse module from build and avoid installing nvparse.

The Cg 1.2 Runtime

The Cg 1.2 runtime is necessary in order to compile the osgNVCg module, which adds support for high-level Cg shaders. Older versions of the Cg runtime won't work. If you are not going to use Cg shaders in your applications then you can exclude osgNVCg from build.

OpenGL

Last but not least, osgNV and its dependencies work on top of OpenGL. You will need an OpenGL-compatible development environment to build osgNV, as well as an OpenGL-compatible hardware to run applications based on osgNV.