BlackBerry GamePlay3D

So this is the first in a series of blog posts that explore the cross-platform Gameplay SDK that BlackBerry (remember them?) is producing.
First thing to do is to explore www.gameplay3d.org and see what the capabilities of the SDK are.
Second thing to do is to clone the Git repository. I did this by using the quite nice (Metro style) Git for Windows application from windows.github.com.

For whatever reason, this app thinks that I have modified SDK files (32 of them!), even though I haven’t. This prevents me from changing branches (from master to next, for example), even if I discard the changes for every file (has to be done individually, very annoying).

The program has this annoying behavior on both of my Windows systems (one running Windows 7, the other running the Windows 8 Consumer Preview). So, if you want one of the other branches, I suggest simply downloading the .zip archive from Git. Use the “Clone in Windows” button to clone using the Metro app, or use “ZIP” to download the snapshot.

If that is not a concern (probably should not be), then GitHub for Windows is good enough at cloning repositories. One other annoyance – GitHub for Windows does not allow you to select the folder where repositories will reside. The default (when cloning the Gameplay repository) is %Userpath%\%Username%\Documents\GitHub\GamePlay, so fair warning. I’m sure GitHub will for the kinks out of the program eventually (at the time of this writing it is only version 1.0, just out of Beta).
So for the next part, I followed the directions in this post: http://www.gamefromscratch.com/post/2012/05/02/A-quick-look-at-RIM%E2%80%99s-Gameplay-12-SDK.aspx
The author does a great job of getting you up to speed quickly with a Windows app. Mobile platforms (Android and iOS) require quite a bit of additional work that I will not get into here. Start by running the gameplay-newproject.bat file in the gameplay directory.
Public Service Announcement: Build errors. C++ would not be any fun without them.

If you want to avoid them, I suggest keeping the project on the same hard drive as the gameplay sdk when prompted by the gameplay-newproject.bat batch file. Additionally, the batch file does NOT like path names with a space in them.

Make sure to add the gameplay.vcxproj project (located in your Documents or wherever you extracted the .zip to) as a dependency.

Then build! I am using Visual Studio Professional 2010, but it should build just fine in an Express edition if that is all you have. I would not recommend using a version older than 2010, though.
Great success. But boring.

Next time, we will spice this up a bit.
V/R
Jaegermeiste