some suggestions to compile Irrlicht with Dev-CPP (mingw)...

[cmoibenlepro]

I'm thinking about ways to compile the Irrlicht lib in a better way.

Here is a 1st tip :
add -s to the linker options so the .dll will be smaller in size because it strips the debug informations that you don't need (unless you want to debug and develop Irrlitch itself...)


Now I'm trying to make the compile with directx8 more effective...
The tutorial about comiling with directx8 by stoffe works, BUT you need to add another dll to your project (d3dx8d.dll) so its 700KB more in size to download for the end-user that will play your game...

the problem with this dll that come with the directx package is that it is a debug dll. So, unlike the normal release dll, it is not included with the runtime libraries that come with windows... so people will absolutly need to download it if they want to play your game... also it is maybe slower than the normal dll (?) ...
so I don't really like to use it...

Apparently, visualC++ user don't need to use that d3dx8d.lib and use directly d3dx8.lib... but I'm not able to find a version of this lib for mingw...
So I tried to download the virsualc++ version and convert it with reimp, but it don't works... I also tried to link this lib directly because mingw is supposed to support it but it gives errors...

so maybe I need to use other libraries... witch ones are linked with the visualc++ version?

I will try to do some more research... does someone already tried to do the same thing?

anyway, I will give you more info when I will find something else...

[Electron]

From all I've heard (and for all Microsoft toutes COM for compatibility) it is not possible to compile DX stuff with MingW. Something incompatible with the linking I think, and I doubt any way to solve it without daunting modifications to MingW itself, requiring an enormous amount of information about compilers,linking, and DX that I think few if any around here posses. The d3dx8.dll is simply a wrapper I think, probably compiled with VC++, that calls DX functions. There is not just one version of this, and I think there's another thread on this forum about one that's supposed to be better. Unfortunately, it is probably slower having to go thru an extra dll, but I cannot think of a way around it. I am not very knowledgable on the subject though, so don't just assum I'm correct. Someone on the Ogre forums created a new linking program for use with dev-cpp/mingW that I think allowed one to compile Ogre on Dev-cpp, which apparently otherwise could not be done. It might be worth seeing if you can try and find out more about that, because I think it was mroe like VC++'s linker.