# S TEVE'S P ORTABLE G AME L IBRARY.

And Lo, the Lion and the Sheep shall lie down together - but the Sheep won't get much Sleep.
-- Woody Allen

# PLIB: A Suite of Portable Game Libraries.

I (and an ever increasing band of helpers) have been spending time to build a set of OpenSource (LGPL) libraries that will permit programmers to write games and other realtime interactive applications that are 100% portable across a wide range of hardware and operating systems.

PLIB includes sound effects, music, a complete 3D engine, font rendering, a simple Windowing library, a game scripting language, a GUI, networking, 3D math library and a collection of handy utility functions. All are 100% portable across nearly all modern computing platforms. What's more, it's all available on line - and completely free. Each library component is fairly independent of the others - so if you want to use SDL, GTK, GLUT, or FLTK instead of PLIB's 'PW' windowing library, you can.

The latest stable version of PLIB is 1.8.4 - go to the DOWNLOAD section to get a copy - go to the WHAT'S INSIDE section for documentation and a more detailed description of what PLIB contains.

If you are looking at other games libraries (and there are a LOT to choose from) - ask yourself how many games have been written for that library by people outside the group that wrote it. That is the acid test of usability and PLIB passes with flying colours.

PLIB is used by many projects (not all games - and not all OpenSourced), here are some of the more prominent ones - there are at least a hundred others:

Tux the Penguin - A Quest for herring. | TuxKart | FlightGear | Majik3D
PrettyPoly Editor | TuxFleet | TORCS | Minigolf Maniacs

Flight Dynamics Simulator | MOTE | Spacething

Unlike the many similar libraries, PLIB is easy to learn and use - and has an object-oriented C++ interface. It's built as a set of component libraries that you can pick and choose between if (for example) you don't want to use PLIB's GUI but you do want to use it's scene graph API.

If you are reading this document from the source distribution on your local disk, you can find the most up to date version of PLIB here:

http://plib.sf.net

PLIB's web presence is currently hosted on SourceForge (with thanks to VA Linux Inc for providing this free service), and the project summary page is here:

http://sf.net/projects/plib