[osg-users] Plugin problems with Visual Studio 2008

[Michael Guerrero]

I just recently encountered this same problem.  Here's my situation: i had both
vs2005 and vs2008 installed and had no problems as Paul mentions.  Then I
removed vs2005 and after that the osgdb_png plugin could not be loaded.  I
traced it all the way down to DynamicLibrary.cpp at line 96: 

#if defined(WIN32) && !defined(__CYGWIN__)
    handle = LoadLibrary( libraryName.c_str() );

It was failing to load it due to compiler incompatibilities.  osgdb_png was
linking against a libpng and zlib that were built with vs2005.  After much
effort I recompiled zlib and libpng with vs2008 and replaced the libraries and
then rebuilt osgdb_png.  Now everything is back to normal.

A couple of very strange things I noticed: 

a) Everything worked before removing vs2005
b) The latest version of libpng seems to be 1.2.29 while the name of the 3rd
party dependency is libpng13.  The version I compiled came out as libpng12.