Using RobotSimulator as a library

[eduardo98m]

I have been trying to use RobotSimulator API, wich I think is the c++ equivalent of the pybullet API. The problem is that i doesnt come up as a Bullet library (It is not possible to use it with vcpkg like the bullet base classes) and its has been imposible to compile it from the examples folder.

To clarify I made a new folder for my project and downloaded the Bullet libraries using vcpkg, the copied the examples and Extras folders and made simple c++ script using b3RobotSimulatorClientAPI, (I think I copied that script from one of the examples). I have changed some of the CMAKELIST.txt so it doesn't import bullet from the src/ folder and to specify the location of the other libraries. But every time i compile the project a bunch of linking errors come up The last one was this LINK : fatal error LNK1104: cannot open file 'BulletRobotics.lib' . It seems to me that this is not the right way to work with the RobotSimulator in C++.

Do you think it is more easy just to clone the Bullet Repo and import the headers and files from it. What it is the best way to do it? Should i just add the Bullet folder as a subdirectory in my CMAKE? Do you have any suggestion for working with RobotSimulator.

Note: The purpose of working in C++ and not in python with pybullet is to exploit the parallezation capabilites of c++, to run simulations.

[eduardo98m]

Ok, so after a few days of suffering with cmake I got it working. The issue was the following: I tried to use the libraries compiled by bullet extras, speciffically BulletRobotics and BulletRoboticsGUI, but by some reason these libraries did not have the implementations to the b3RobotSimulatorClientAPI functions. To solve the issue I compiled a custom library for robotics using as an example the pybullet sources. I will be making a pull request so hopefully it will included in the official bullet repository.

In case I disappear here is more detailed explanation of my solution:
I got it working by adding bullet3 as a ThirdParty Library in my project (pulling the github repo and compiling it from source), and modifying the repository: I added an extra folder inside the bullet3 directory with the cmakelist.txt of the library. The I added to my project by linking the library (only this compiled library and opengl I did not add any other bullet library as those probably contained implementations for the same functions and could cause a linking error) I also added the pertinent folders to the include directoriues in the cmake. BTW, I got it working on windows, but I think i would be easy to translate it to MACos and Linux as i used the cmakelist of one of one of the extras (BulletRobotics) as a template for my cmake. The list of sources was copied from the setup.py for the pybullet installation but I also added the b3RobotSimulatorClientAPI as it was no in the list of sources.