For developers

Browse the open source files  (CVS)

All of the files for the open source VPython project are available. Click on "Browse CVS Repository" to see the files. (Note: At sourceforge.net the project has the original name, visualpython.) The files for the current version of Visual are in the vpython folder. The folder vpython-core2 contains a beta version originatged by Jonathan Brandmeyer to add transparency, sophisticated lighting, and surface textures to Visual.

Compiling VPython from source

To compile VPython from source on any platform (Windows, Linux/Unix, Macintosh), start by downloading the Linux package for the Visual module. See detailed instructions in the INSTALL.txt file included in the package. For the beta version, get a Linux package from sourceforge.

Here are notes on what was required to compile Visual 4 on Windows using the gtkmm libraries that are also available on other platforms. This approach was overly complicated and has been abandoned. Building Visual 4 from source is now done using Microsoft Visual Studio.

One does need to find or create binaries of specific Boost libraries for Windows, to provide the glue between the Visual C++ code and Python. These are needed whether building using gtkmm or not. These binaries are now included in the CVS "dependencies" folder for Visual at sourceforge.