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.

In the process of working on gtkmm-based build on Windows, it was found that one difficulty was that it was difficult to find or build binaries for gtkglextmm. On the chance that these Windows binaries might be of use to someone (not for Visual any more), here are gtkglextmm binaries for Windows.

Similarly, it can be difficult to find or build binaries for gtkglextmm for the Ubuntu 7.10 version of Linux, so here are gtkglextmm binaries for Ubuntu 7.10.