Need help bad, nooby questions.... so confused it hurts.

aussiedude · Post by **aussiedude** » Mon Feb 26, 2007 9:51 am

Hello everyone,

I need help. I just started a project for school where I will be making a simple chat program for the students to talk to each other in. The program also features controls so that the teachers can watch how the students are using the chat program and monitor conversations and log off students if they do something they shouldn't. I doing this because the school and government insist that if students are going to do anything on computers that it has to be watched, right now because they can't be bothered to make a chat program for the students to use I decided that the students should make it, that way although the school decide how we use it, at we can say we made it. For the networking I'm using Dyconnect. For everything else (GUI and File Handling etc) I'm using Irrlicht. Before this project can even get off the ground I need to jump this one hurdle which is causing me great pain. (PS: for future reference I use
Windows XP and Dev-C++ and whatever is the lastest version of Irrlicht, I update regularly)

I need to learn how to build lib's and API's in MingW so I can compile and use Dyconnect. I'm currently in a state of complete confusion and have no idea what to do, and "a simple google search" which normally is a wonderful help is just offering me more to think and about and to get confused by.

By the way, what is MinGW? I know what it does but I don't know what it is if that makes any sense, is it a API and program... what is it? Is it only command based or can I build something like Dyconnect in Dev-C++ using the MinGW in that?

Basically I'm asking for 1 of 3 things:

1. A simple straight forword explanation of how to build something in MinGW. Either someone could write out a few clear easy to understand notes or even a link or two to some tutorials would greatly appreciated.

2. A explanation of how to compile Dyconnect would be great! I'm quite happy to only learn how to build Dyconnect if I can't figure out how to build in MinGW in general.

3. A windows build of Dyconnect. If no one here wants to show me how to do these things (which would be ok, I don't blam you, you can be doing alot of better things with your time then answering silly beginner questions

) then can someone please download the dyconnect source and do a windows build for me and just send it to me (just send me a pm and I send you my email if you want).

Some links for everyone who wants to help me:
http://junction.bafsoft.com/
http://junction.bafsoft.com/#dyconnect
http://junction.bafsoft.com/dyconnect/
http://www.allegro.cc/resource/Librarie ... /DyConnect
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dyconnect

PS: Irrlicht ROCKS! and it does so because of it's community.

rogerborg · Post by **rogerborg** » Mon Feb 26, 2007 11:34 am

What problems does DynConnect solve for you?

A "simple chat program" can be written using basic BSD sockets and TCP streams; I very much doubt that you need a library to do that for you, and learning (portable, industry standard) BSD sockets will be a better investment of your time than learning one particular socket abstraction library.

rumpl · Post by **rumpl** » Mon Feb 26, 2007 1:41 pm

MinGW: A collection of freely available and freely distributable Windows specific header files and import libraries combined with GNU toolsets that allow one to produce native Windows programs that do not rely on any 3rd-party C runtime DLLs.

It's clear no? With MinGW you get the headers, a compiler, a assembler, a debugger, all that you need to build applications. These programs (gcc, ld, as, gdb, make...) are textual (no GUI) and Devc++ use them to compile you'r program.

If you don't want to use Devc++ and you have MinGW, all that you have to do is put in the PATH variable the path where all those programs are (it's a directory named 'bin'). Now that you did that, test it, open the comand prompt and type gcc. If there is no problem (possible problem: the path in the PATH variable is bad and you get a 'bla bla bla internal command bla bla) you can write a simple program. Or, you can compile the Dyconnect library. To compile it just go to the Dyconnect directory and type:
make -f makefile.mingw
If everything goes well, you should get a .dll (at least I think, I'm not a windows user)

There you go, so, if you want to build the dyconnect library you need
1. MinGW, download it, but it comes with Devc++.
2. The right path in the PATH variable http://www.google.com/search?&q=setting ... H+variable
3. The Dyconnect sources

Once you have the dyconnect library compiled, I suggest you to use devc++.

Note: just downoladed the dyconnect lib, and you have all the install process explained in installdocs/mingw.txt.

omar shaaban · Post by **omar shaaban** » Mon Feb 26, 2007 7:41 pm

i see it is easy to built a chat program wwith vb6.0 and what will irrlicht do with that!!?