Building Spring on Windows

Development < Building Spring < Building Spring on Windows

Warning: compiling on spring on Windows mostly cause problems, we heavily suggest to use Linux for developing the spring rts engine!

Some reasons:

• setting up a build environment takes a lot more time on windows
• compiling is slower on windows
• compiling on windows is badly tested (which possible lead to some random / unknown / weird errors)
• windows is closed source, while spring is open source, the philosohpy doesn't fit well together

Get the Source Code

Tarballs

(For playing online official games on lobby.springrts.com - the spring lobby server)

Using Git is the recommended way to get the sources of the engine. In spite of, you can use the official tarballs to compile Spring without git.

Note: Do NOT use the zip-files from github, they are missing important data to compile Spring.

See Building spring for build instructions.

Git

Spring project page at github

Master repo URI: git://github.com/spring/spring.git
Backup repo: git://git.code.sf.net/p/springrts/code

Branches of interest:

• master - latest stable, enforced for official games on lobby.springrts.com
• maintenance - fixes for the latest stable
• develop - major developments (most active, larger developments)

Assuming the GIT command line client is installed, you can clone (get locally) the repository with the commands below.

Latest Stable (master branch, useless for development purposes, lives as maintenance moving forward)

git clone --recursive git://github.com/spring/spring.git -b master

To later update it (get the changes other people did) with:

git pull --rebase

Maintenance (maintenance branch)

git clone --recursive git://github.com/spring/spring.git -b maintenance

Bleeding-edge (develop branch)

git clone --recursive git://github.com/spring/spring.git -b develop

Working with git

Please note that patches to the code must be done for either develop or maintenance. Such patches can be then sent to one of the developers with repository access. If you are new to git and github, you may want to have a look at this guide to get you started.

Note: you can switch branches this way:<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">

1. (optional) backup your current code changes

git stash

1. switch branch

git checkout $MY_OTHER_BRANCH

1. sometimes needed
2. note, it deletes all your unstashed changes and all non-pushed commits on the new branch,
3. but it doesn't delete untracked files.
4. git reset --hard

1. update/sync with remote repo

git pull --rebase

1. (optional) if you want to apply the code changes backed-up in the first step
2. git stash pop # reapplies your changes and DELETES the backup
3. or
4. git stash apply --index 0 # reapplies your changes and keep the backup (see `git stash list`)

</syntaxhighlight>

Submodules

To obtain the submodules you should clone the repository with --recursive as mentioned above. If you haven't done this, you can execute the following code <syntaxhighlight lang="bash"> git submodule sync git submodule update --init

</syntaxhighlight>

To update the submodules, you have to execute the same commands again or pull normally.

Compiling with MinGW+CMake

Compiling Spring in MinGW requires >=GCC 4.x.

Because the official MinGW installer and packages are outdated, we recommend to use the TDM web-installer instead, to install the official MinGW Stable (not TDM-GCC) package:

TDM webinstaller

Download and run the On-Demand Installer (tdm-gcc-webdl).

Select at least the following components:

• gcc (version: MinGW Stable!)
  • core
  • g++
  • openmp
• binutils
• mingw-runtime
• w32api
• mingw32-make (if you have no Make installed yet)
• gdb (recommended for debugging)

Possible Problems

• If you get undefined reference to `_Unwind_Resume' linking errors, deinstall whole TDM/MinGW and reinstall it with dwarf2 (MinGW Stable should have it enabled).

• When you installed an old version of MinGW/TDM and forgot to deinstall it correctly, gcc.exe & g++.exe will be named gcc-dw2.exe/g++-dw2.exe. CMake will then fail to find the correct one, first try to deinstall anything mingw related and reinstall everything. If that didn't helped just rename the files. If even that doesn't help open cmake-gui and click the advanced button and set the paths to the correct files yourself (CMAKE_C_COMPILER & CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER).

Spring MinGW Dependencies (mingwlibs)

You also need some Spring dependencies, prepackaged in the mingwlibs archive.

• use git's bash (you find it in the right click context menu when clicking the folder), cd into your spring source dir
• run git clone git://github.com/spring/mingwlibs.git
• and update it from time to time with: git pull --rebase

• Make sure you install the package in the checkout directory, so the path is: /spring/mingwlibs. If done right, it will look like:
  • */spring/
  • */spring/...
  • */spring/mingwlibs
  • */spring/rts

• Note: if you install the package somewhere else (preferably outside of the source tree), and pass its location with the MINGDIR option to CMake in the configure step (see further down, in the quick instructions).

Installing CMake

First get CMake here and install it.

then

• run the cmake-gui and select a source and a build directory
• configure and follow the instructions, and adjust variables to your needs (defaults are OK)
• You might need to set the freetype lib to spring/vclibs/freetype/lib/freetype.lib (and need to get vclibs for this)
• press Generate
• open a console (cmd.exe), cd into your build directory
• optional: for multi-threaded compilation, the mingw32-make part may differ on your system:

  set MAKE_COMMAND=mingw32-make -j2

• compile with:

  mingw32-make install-spring

Generating the AI Sources/Wrappers

you can either build the wrapper:

make Cpp-AIWrapper

or generate all sources, in case you don't need the binary:

make generateSources

Compiling with Visual Studio (not officially supported!)

Visual Studio works only on Windows 7 and above!

General Visual Studio Notes

When developing using Visual Studio keep in mind:

• It's experimental and not proved to compile or run!
• Your VS build won't sync with GCC builds in multiplayer mode
• AIs built with Visual Studio will work with the mingw32 release builds thanks to the C AI Interface, however this interface may change when newer releases are made
• Running any non-LUA AI on VS built Spring will crash it

2012 (v11)

Install Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows Desktop, cmake, 7-zip and msysgit.

From the Startmenu run "VS2012 x86 Native Tools Command Prompt" and type:

set PATH=%PATH%;%PROGRAMFILES%\git\bin;%PROGRAMFILES%\cmake 2.8\bin\
git clone git://github.com/spring/spring.git
cd spring
git clone git://github.com/spring/vclibs11.git vclibs
cmake -G "Visual Studio 11" .

Now start visual studio & open Spring.sln. Select "engine-legacy" as default project, as AIs and ofter stuff are known to fail to compile on visual studio.

In the Project Properties, make sure to select the Microsoft Visual C++ Compiler Nov 2012 CTP.

Note: Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows Desktop is for free, but requires a registration after 30 days (to get a free license).