Days go by, and still I think about you

I wanted to explore what wxWidgets was all about after learning that tool programmers in the game industry commonly use it in their development environment. Getting started with wxWidgets on a windows platform is fairly straight forward.

Download the latest stable release http://www.wxwidgets.org/downloads/
Go ahead and grab wxMSW - installer for Windows. Make sure your visual studio is closed so that the environment variable gets set up correctly.

Next your going to need to compile the library. So go ahead and navigate to installDir\build\msw.
Open up wx.dsw and convert it to your native Visual Studio format. Close visual studio back down and open up each vcproj in the current directory through notepad or notepad++. Search and replace each of the following:
- RuntimeLibrary=”3″ with RuntimeLibrary=”1″
- RuntimeLibrary=”2″ with RuntimeLibrary=”0″

Once your done. Open up the solution again, and right click the solution in the solution explorer. Select Batch Build. Select only the release and debug for each project. Once complete your ready to create your first wxWidget application with the added work of including all the directories and .lib in your project settings.

Here are two good links to help you get through this:
http://wiki.wxwidgets.org/Compiling_WxWidgets_on_Windows
http://wiki.wxwidgets.org/MSVC_.NET_Setup_Guide#Project_Properties

If it doesn’t work out right, go ahead and triple check everything!

What I learned from all this was that while wxWidgets are great for multiplatform development they are probably not a solution for developing game GUIs. I’d love to hear what others think on this subject, meanwhile I’ll move on to setting up my own GUI framework after a few hours of sleep.