As windows doesn't natively come with a rich set of developments libraries like Unix, one is likely to need to download most of the dependancies below. However, to make life easier for Windows users, we have put together a .zip archive with all the required dependancies which can be download and installed somewhere in you system, you'll need to set VisualStudio to pick up on the include and libs, and the PATH set to pick up in the dll's. Alternatively, a more hacky but simpler solution is to unpack this archive inside you OpenSceneGraph distribution, so that all the include files drop into OpenSceneGraph/include, and the libs drop into OpenSceneGraph/lib, and all the dll's drop into OpenSceneGraph/bin, this way VisualStudio will pick up the files simpler through the paths set up inside the workspace and project files. The archive can be downloaded here: . .
Currently the only dependancy of the core scene graph libraries (osg,osgUtil and osgDB) is Standard C++ and OpenGL. The osgText library, osgGLUT have the following dependancies, these arn't core libraries so arn't needed to be compiled unless you need that feature. The demos do however require osgGLUT so its likely that you will typically need it when trying out the osg. The osgtext demo adds an osgText dependancies as well, you only need to compile them if you need to a demo of those features.
Follows is the list of depedencies which some of the osgPlugins require, note the core osg and viewer do not need the following dependencies, you only need the following if you require each specific plugin. Note, the flt, 3ds, pic, tga, do not have any dependencies other than Standard C++ so will compile straight of the bag. Under Linux the majority of the depedancies below come as standard with distributions so you may not need to download them at all. Its best to try out a straight compile of the osg, if you get missing includes/libs errors then chase up the below.