In order to build the core Demeter Terrain Engine and use it in your own applications, the only library you need to link with is OpenGL (including GLU.) However, to take advantage of all of the features of Demeter, such as the automatic loading of elevation and texture files, you will want to have all of the following libraries. If you already have these libraries installed in the standard locations for your environment then Demeter will find them. Alternatively, you can download the separate package called “DemeterWin32Dependencies.zip” which includes all of these libraries in an easy format for use with Demeter on Windows. Unix developers will have to install these libraries separately.

GDAL

The Geospatial Data Abstraction Library by Frank Warmerdam. You can find it at http://www.remotesensing.org/gdal/. The latest tested version is 1.1.7. This is an excellent library that enables Demeter to load elevation data from a variety of file formats such as grayscale and color image files, DEM, SDTS, etc. See the section on the GDALElevationLoader for details.

SDL / SDL_image

The Simple Direct Media Layer, led by Sam Lantinga. This is a cross-platform graphics library (among its many other uses.) Having this library on your system allows Demeter to load textures from standard image files (such as .PNG, .JPG, .BMP, etc.) You can get it at http://www.libsdl.org. You must get both SDL itself AND the SDL_image library from the “libraries” section of that site.

OpenSceneGraph

The Open Scene Graph is a cross-platform C++/OpenGL library for real-time visualization. Uses range from visual simulation, scientific modeling, virtual reality through to games. Demeter integrates tightly with OSG so that you have powerful options for populating your terrain with entities such as vegetation, vehicles, people, etc. You can get it at http://www.openscenegraph.org. You MUST get a newer version that 0.9.1 (at the time of this writing, that means you must get their latest CVS tarball since 0.9.2 isn’t yet released.)

libxml