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Building on MSVC

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Thomas Wright edited this page May 9, 2023 · 53 revisions

Clone

git clone --recursive https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/spring -b BAR105 spring

If you cloned before without --recursive, you can apply --recursive with

cd spring

git submodule update --init --recursive

MSVC - x64

Once spring is cloned.

cd spring (if not already in the spring directory)

git clone https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/vclibs64 vclibs64

  • Dont change path name of vclibs64 or cmake won´t find the libs

VCPkg

./vcpkg install jsoncpp ./vcpkg install minizip

the main command for setting up vcpkg for handing env vars within cmake for downloadable libraries is :

cmake -B ../spring -S . -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=../vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake

Inside the ./spring folder

Dependencies

Windows Environmental variables

Env variables can be used to avoid copying potentially large maps and games folders into the same folder as the build sizes grow with prod.

The easiest way is using the debug launcher found at https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/bar_debug_launcher

or you can add to environmental variables in Windows settings (or [advanced] use script to set them up each time the engine is launched) In Powershell cmd

  • set SPRING_DATADIR=<place to where your content root is>
  • set SPRING_WRITEDIR=<place to where your content root is>

E.g. your spring maps are at E:\spring\maps, <place to where your content root is> should be E:\spring
Note set is only needed if you launch from script, Windows environment variables dialog needs no set

Building

  • Launch cmake with cmake-gui .
  • Set source code to the cloned spring repository.
  • Pick the build dir separate from the main spring dir (for example spring/build-msvc)
  • In the CMAKELIST file in spring change (AI_TYPES = ALL) to (AI_TYPES = NATIVE).
  • Ensure that MINGWLIBS points to the cloned vclibs64 repository (it should already be set correct if vclibs64 was cloned to spring).
  • Under Tools, press Configure, choose MSVC 2022 / x64 when asked, then press Generate.
  • Go to the build directory and open the project file Spring.sln.
  • Find engine-legacy in the the projects list and set it to be the Startup Project
  • Build the project in MSVC
  • Copy *.dll from vclibs14/dll into the builddir (Debug/Release/etc)
  • Copy unitsync.dll from somewhere or just create an empty file in the builddir (Debug/Release/etc)*
  • If you did not set the SPRING_DATADIR and SPRING_WRITEDIR env variables, copy maps, games, base and fonts from an existing spring install into builddir.
  • Launch the engine right from the debugger (MSVC environment variables (as set from the debugger menu) are broken, use some .bat script to set env variables (in case not set globally) and launch spring.exe
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