Appendix A - Compiling and Installing Plugins

The RAYZ SDK (Software Development Kit) is supplied with a single library to link against, a large number of source examples, and a collection of header files to include in your plugins. Aside from this documentation, you will find numerous useful comments in both the header files and in the source examples.

There is also a single executable file, which is a utility for helping make icons for nodes.

Compiling Plugins

A good first step is to copy the source examples to your home directory, and then compile them there.

Assuming you have copied the source example directories to a directory called plugins in your home directory, you would do the following:

IRIX:

% cd plugins/Nodes
% make -f Makefile.example.irix
Repeat for the other source directories.

Linux:

% cd plugins/Nodes
% make -f Makefile.example.linux
Repeat for the other source directories.

Windows NT/2000: [to be written]


Installing Plugins

There are two possibilities. The first, which is not recommended, is to place the compiled .so files into the rayz distribution, which is normally
/usr/grail/rayz2.2/plugIns IRIX, Linux
C:\Program Files\Silicon Grail\rayz2.2\plugIns     Windows NT, 2000

A better way is to use the environment variable RAYZ_PLUGIN_PATH to point to the location of your plugins. Rayz will search this location recursively, looking for plugins to load at startup. You want to make sure you don't undefine the default location, because that is where the image format plugins are stored. In general, assuming that you are compiling the plugins supplied with RAYZ and that they are located at /usr/yourname/plugins, you want to do something like this:

IRIX:
Assuming the IRIX cshell:

% setenv RAYZ_PLUGIN_PATH "/usr/grail/rayz2.2/plugIns:/usr/yourname/plugins"
Linux:
Setting this up depends on the shell you are using. If you are using tcsh, the command is the same as for the IRIX csh example.
% setenv RAYZ_PLUGIN_PATH "/usr/grail/rayz2.2/plugIns:/usr/yourname/plugins"
If you are using bash, you have to export the variable, as in
% RAYZ_PLUGIN_PATH="/usr/grail/rayz2.2/plugIns:/usr/yourname/plugins"
% export RAYZ_PLUGIN_PATH
All of these are best set up once, of course, as part of your login environment.

Windows:
Environment variables are accessed through the Properties panel on the My Computer icon.


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