A bit of order about using external libraries

mauriliodc
Sat, 05 Sep 2015 20:33:43 +0000
C++

Hello everyone.
I have successfully added to my project a couple of libraries like: opencv, xsens and libnoise.
I followed this guide OPENCV UE4 and everything works like a charm, but i have a couple of questions because I am not sure what is going under the hood (and that’s bad!)

I am not experienced on windows platforms but basically I am pretty sure that a .lib is like a .a and **.dll ** is the like a .so in a linux environment. My point is, under linux i can link against a .so and everything works.
Why i need to both .lib and .dll under windows? What am I missing?

In the linked wiki page at a certain point you need to copy the library you are using in project’s folder i.e Binaries/Win64/ . That’s a mandatory passage otherwise your editor will not start. I did like that for opencv and xsens and everything worked, I deleted those libraries from that folder and the editor could not start anymore. Exactly what I was expecting. The situation changed using libnoise, I can start and use my editor even if I did not copy the libnoise.a and libnoise.dll in such folder. I am missing something here, the question is what.

Thank you so much, I hope to clarify at least this couple of doubts I have (the others can wait!)

3 posts - 1 participant