Spring on MacOSX

Duplicate and missing information

This page is a partial duplicate of Building_Spring_on_MacOSX but both have unique information.

Whats up with spring on OS X

There has been a working, compiled universal binary for Macintosh OSX 10.4. However, this is an outdated version, and development has ceased since the release.

Because a lack of Mac developers (or maybe the lack of Macs for the developers) there is no Mac binary for any recent version of spring. Various people have managed to get it to compile and run on OS X, and we received some patches, but no one ever created a binary package.

We need YOU

If you have a Mac, and want to help spring, make a binary package. Lots of people tried, some of them failed, some succeeded, some of them even send patches, but noone stayed long enough to make one.

Thus, it should not be that hard to actually do it. All libraries used by spring are available on OS X, and beside some (or maybe even none) compile errors, spring will most likely compile and work fine.

If you need help, post on forum or ask in the lobby (channel #sy).

Notes

Network sync presently restricts play to between computers of the same architecture type. Cross architecture network support is being worked on but will have to wait till there's hardware to work with.

I was told in chat today that 64bit builds will sync with 32bit builds. It might have changed. --Patmo98 18:14, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Lobby informations for OSX are old & outdated, someone please update this page and the lobby link with fresh informations. <Brain Damage>

Due to the lack of information about a working lobby, the only sure way play between two computers must be initiated manually via start scripts and/or command line.

See the Lobby_on_MacOSX page for details and development progress

Building the Engine

Currently there are a number of efforts underway to get Spring ported to Mac OS X and able to play multiplayer online.

You will need some 3rd party libraries installed in order to build the code yourself. The simplest way to do this is by using Darwin Ports - grab it from http://www.darwinports.com

Once you have that, you will need to open a shell and install the Boost, DevIL and Glew libraries like so:

$ sudo port install boost
$ sudo port install libdevil
$ sudo port install glew

In each case the libraries and all their dependencies will be downloaded and compiled (could take quite some time, so be patient). Once you have that, and a Spring source repository on your Mac, go to your spring source root directory and do this:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ ccmake ..

This will allow you to configure cmake according to your environment. Note that one of the options is to specify whether or not an .app bundle is produced by the build process. Once you have succesfully configured, you should be able to build the source using the make command:

$ make