I have been reading up on cross platform development with OpenGL for games. We are looking at developing a game which will be available to Linux users too. I have however come across something I am not quite getting my head around.
How to create a portable linux executable? Specifically how to get the various different versions of OpenGL / Mesa3D to work in one (or more) executable file/s (we do not want to distribute the source).
Over on Linux Questions http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-software-2/hardware-acceleration-using-opengl-and-x11-876634/ someone goes in to detail on how Mesa3D / OpenGL work but what I am struggling to see is how I would go about using each distro's version of Mesa3D within my compiled executable (not even sure if it is possible).
From what I can tell I am required to dynamically link parts of the application together on each users machine, possibly through the use of an installer? If this is the case can we part compile the program and link at runtime for Mesa3D / OpenGL much like OpenGL's dll's can do on Windows?
Just link your executable dynamically against libGL.so and be done with it. The binary interface of that is common among all implementations of OpenGL.
From what I can tell I am required to dynamically link parts of the application together on each users machine, possibly through the use of an installer?
Not you do the linking and neither does a installer. The dynamic linking happens automatically when the executable is loaded. Dynamic linking is how DLLs get loaded in Windows and the *nix counterpart Shared Objects (.so) on *nix.
When building your program, you add the option -lGL to the linker command line and it will add a dynamic linkage entry to libGL.so to the exeutable. That you can then redistribute. When the program gets started on the target system, the dynamic linker will locate the libGL.so and load it.