First person shooter (FPS) control demo in GLUT

Last Updated on August 27, 2012 by nghiaho12

Today I was looking around for some quick copy and paste code to add FPS gaming control to a small GLUT application I am writing. Half an hour or so of searching later and I still couldn’t find anything that I liked. A lot of the results were from forums of people trying to roll out their own code. I gave up and resorted to something I didn’t think I’d ever do, use code I wrote during my PhD …

After an hour or so of tinkering I got something that I’m happy with. I got my GLUT demo to do the following:

  • W,A,S,D keys for moving and strafing
  • Mouse look (default is inverted mouse)
  • Mouse button to fly up/down
  • SPACEBAR to toggle FPS control mode
  • Mouse always stays within the window with the cursor hidden

It has the feel of a proper FPS game.

Here’s what the demo looks like. Interestingly, when taking a screenshot the mouse cursor appears in the image.

The demo code can be used as a copy and paste project to quickly get a viewer running. All you have to do is add your rendering code into the Display() function.

Download

GlutFPS.tar.gz

The demo requires freeglut to be installed. You can use CodeBlocks to open up the project or type make if you’re in Linux. If you’re using Windows you’ll have to setup your own Visual Studio project.

If you have any questions just leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.

16 thoughts on “First person shooter (FPS) control demo in GLUT”

  1. hello that is what I am looking for ty I also try to write code for this but no chance I did something but it was too stupid you know what ever

    can you make a tutorial video for this

  2. I got an unresolved external symbols error when trying to run this?
    Any idea how to run this file in visual studio?

  3. wow thanks for the extremely fast reply..

    I got this error :
    error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol “public: void __thiscall Camera::Init(void)” (?Init@Camera@@QAEXXZ) referenced in function “public: __thiscall Camera::Camera(void)” (??0Camera@@QAE@XZ) C:\Users\Kenny\Documents\Visual Studio 2012\Projects\FPSMovement\Source.obj

      1. Well, after stupid trying for a bit, i changed the include “Camera.h” into “Camera.cpp” and it’s working perfectly…

        Still weird why include Camera.h not working..

        Anyway thanks for the code!! It’s really help me starting with my project!
        Cheers!!

  4. Thanks so much I have been trying my own implementation of this and I got horrific stuttering in my camera. I read through your code and saw the just_warped bool in the mouse callback which fixed it up.

  5. Why do you multiply *cos(vertical_angle) when you calculate the direction you are looking to on the z and x axis? It behaves the same without it and I can’t explain the reason.
    Thanks!

    1. Ooops, I got why you do it. That way you can do free movement with the camera, Since I am doing two dimensional movement I didn’t realize.

  6. Great Prog!! Thank you SO MUCH, Nghia Ho!!!!!

    I also noticed a little glitch: you could not press more keys at once (forward and strafe, for example). So I changed the “end if”s in the Timer function with “if”s and everything works!!!

    THANK YOU AGAIN, MAN!!!!

  7. I am running Linux Mint and I had to add this to line 18 of your Makefile to have it compile correctly:
    -lX11 -lGL

    This is the complete line now with additions in case anyone else has problems compiling.

    LIB = -lglut -lGLU -lX11 -lGL

    Thanks for this very nice example!

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