Setting up SDL in Visual Studio

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I've been updating the lessons now that SDL2 is officially released, please visit my new site on Github that has updated lessons and improved code.


Now that we've got the libraries setup we'll want to link up the them up with our project, so that we can begin using the library, start up Visual Studio and create a new empty C++ project.

To make our project recognize the headers and libraries for SDL we'll have to edit some simple configuration options about our include directories and linker settings.

Right click project name and bring up the properties menu. Under the C/C++ listing select General and click the Additional Include Directories item at the top.

Click the down arrow button at the end of the text entry box, and select Edit.
 

Click on the New Folder icon to add an entry to the list and click the Browse Button (the three dots) at the right side of the text box. Navigate to where you put your SDL folder, and within it select the folder titled 'include'. Hit Select Folder, Ok and Apply to save your selection.

Next we'll want to change the Runtime Library, in the C/C++ menu select Code Generation and find the Runtime Library entry. Select it and change it to Multi-Threaded DLL.

To link up the libraries select the Linker listing beneath C/C++, select the General tab and click on the Additional Library Directories entry, located just about in the middle of the window.

As before, click the down arrow button at the right side of the text box, and select Edit. 

Again select the New Folder button and click on the Browse button (three dots) at the end of the entry box. Navigate to your SDL folder and descend into the folder titled 'lib'. Here you will see two more directories, x86 for 32bit and x64 for 64bit. While you may choose either, keep in mind that by default VC++ is configured to compile to 32bit and you will have to change some other settings accordingly. Select the folder you want to use, I'll be using x86 for this tutorial, hit Select, Ok, and Apply to save your changes.

Next we must specify which libraries we want to link against, so under the Linker menu, select the Input menu and click on the Additional Dependencies text box, selecting as before the down arrow and Edit to bring up the menu.

To let VC++ know which libraries we want to it to use, you will want to enter:

SDL.lib; SDLmain.lib;

Hit Ok and Apply to save the configuration. 
The final step is to change our SubSystem target to Windows. To do this, select the System menu under Linker and change the entry in the SubSystem to Windows.

Hit Apply to save the configuration and Ok to close the properties window.

Now let's test if we've configured everything correctly. Add a new C++ source file to the project and enter

This simple code will initialize SDL and then quit, nothing visible will occur. Try compiling the project, if you get any errors, make sure you didn't skip a step and selected the correct folders. Before you can run this code you will need to put the Dynamic-Linked Library SDL.dll, found in the bin folder of your SDL directory, into the same folder as the executable. If you don't the program will fail to run and will pop up an error that it couldn't find SDL.

As a last extra to save the trouble of having to do this for every SDL project you create, you can export this project as a template. Select the File menu and click Export Template and export it as a Project Template. You can name and set description as you like. Now when creating a new SDL project you can simply select your template, and as long as you haven't moved your SDL folder around everything will already be configured!

End of Lesson 0

If you're having trouble setting up SDL please leave a comment below.

I'll see you again soon in Lesson 1: Hello World