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MSVC-build.md

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Microsoft Visual Studio compilation guide
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Install MSVC, windows runtime libraries and tools

The MSVC Community 2019 edition can be downloaded for free.

The Visual Studio installer presents you with a ton of options for various scenarios you might use it for via the "Workloads" landing page. This is fine for general deployment, but the full install weighs around 7 GB, so you may want to choose individual components to minimise your download time.

When installing include also these individual options:

  • C++, version does not matter
  • Git, the github support feature is optional
  • CMake
  • Windows (10) SDK, any version should do — if not, let us know

The installer does ship Python, but not its debug build, so it's better to use the one provided by vcpkg. It will be installed in the following section.

Install dependencies — external SDKs

After you have installed Visual Studio, you will need to install the libraries that GemRB depends upon to work.

The required external libraries are SDL and Zlib. You will want audio too, so grab OpenAL and the other optional dependencies.

To download them, we use VCPKG, a package manager that is specifically made to support building these libraries (among others) under Windows.

Open a powershell terminal from within Visual Studio: Tools > Command line- > Developer powershell

Then run the following commands. Hint: no need to type anything, copy and hit Shift+Insert.

Download and configure VCPKG with:

git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg
cd vcpkg
.\bootstrap-vcpkg.bat

Then install the all the dependencies:

.\vcpkg install sdl2:x64-windows zlib:x64-windows python2:x64-windows
.\vcpkg install openal-soft:x64-windows sdl2-mixer:x64-windows libpng:x64-windows
.\vcpkg install libogg:x64-windows libvorbis:x64-windows freetype:x64-windows libiconv:x64-windows

And finally tell Visual Studio where to find the new files:

.\vcpkg integrate install

Get GemRB sources and build them

Open Visual Studio again, pick Clone or check out code and point it to your fork or the main repository (see note):

https://github.com/gemrb/gemrb.git

Visual Studio will gladly import GemRB as a CMake based project. The landing page will give you the option to open the built-in CMake settings GUI if you wish to change any default settings.

When you are happy with the configuration, go to Project->Generate cache for GemRB.

To build GemRB go to Build->Build all or hit F7.

If you get any compiler errors instead of a working executable, then save the contents of the build log and open an issue on the tracker.

Configure and run the game

Follow the common instructions.

If you want to run GemRB from within Visual Studio with several config files to be able to test several games at once, add new launcher configurations that specify a path to those config files, so the final invocation is eg. gemrb.exe -c torment.cfg or gemrb.exe -c myiwd2.cfg.