Aquaria/BUILD.win.md

Building Aquaria on Windows

Note that this tries to be a HOWTO for dummies. If you know your way with C++ and CMake then this guide is not for you.

With CMake

Prerequisites

• CMake installed

• Any IDE or compiler toolchain of your choice. Visual Studio Community Edition is recommended.

• Git for Windows or a compatible alternative installed.

• For the sake of this tutorial, assume everything happens in C:\code. If this isn't the case on your system, adapt appropriately.

• Hint: Git for windows integrates with Explorer. To get a git bash quickly, RClick on a directory and choose "git bash here".

Build dependencies

Build SDL2

• Open a git bash in C:\code

• Run these:

git clone https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL.git
cd SDL
git checkout release-2.26.3
mkdir build
cd build
cmake-gui ..

• In CMake GUI, at the bottom, click Configure

  • As generator, your compiler/IDE should be already selected. If not, select the correct one.
    • When using Visual Studio (full version, not VSCode), select the correct version.
    • If in doubt, try "Unix Makefiles".
  • Use default native compilers
  • Click "Finish". This will take a while.
  • When it's done, everything is red.
  • If there's a CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE entry in the list, enter Release
  • Click "Configure" again, then all red should be gone.
  • Click generate.

• At this point, project files are generated and the next goal is to start a build. How exactly this works depends on your IDE/compiler.

  • For commandline compilers (MinGW, MSYS, Clang), you can usually just enter make -j8 and it'll go for a while and build everything.
  • If you use Visual Studio, change the build type (dropdown near the top of the screen) to Release, then Build > Build Solution.
  • Any other IDE? No idea. Go figure it out.

• Now SDL should be built. Check that build/Release/SDL2.dll exists.

• If all is good, anything SDL related can be closed now.

Build Aquaria

• Open a git bash in C:\code
• Run these:

git clone https://github.com/AquariaOSE/Aquaria.git
cd Aquaria
git checkout experimental
mkdir build
cd build
cmake-gui ..

• Now, the same as previously with SDL:
• In CMake GUI, at the bottom, click Configure
  • As generator, your compiler/IDE should be already selected. If not, select the correct one.
    • When using Visual Studio (full version, not VSCode), select the correct version.
    • If in doubt, try "Unix Makefiles".
  • Use default native compilers
  • Click "Finish". This will take a while and eventually pop an error. In the log there should be "Could NOT find SDL2".
  • This is normal. CMake doesn't track things system-wide so it has no idea we just built SDL.
  • Find the entry SDL2MAIN_LIBRARY (that should be NOTFOUND), click that, use the [...] to navigate and select C:/code/SDL/build/Release/SDL2main.lib
  • For SDL2_INCLUDE_DIR, select C:/code/SDL/include
  • For SDL2_LIBRARY_TEMP, select C:/code/SDL/build/Release/SDL2.lib
  • Check that CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE is set to Release
  • Click Configure twice
  • Now all red lines should be gone. Click Generate.
• Build Aquaria. Same procedure as with SDL.
  • If using Visual Studio, don't forget to set the build type to release first (it doesn't care about the CMake setting).
• If all goes well, the finished executable can be found as C:/code/Aquaria/build/Aquaria/Release/aquaria.exe

Updating and running the game

• Copy the built aquaria.exe and also the SDL2.dll from earlier into your Aquaria game directory.
• Copy the contents of C:\code\Aquaria\files (that is, data, gfx, ..., scripts, ...) over the existing files and directories in your Aquaira game directory. Overwrite everything.
• Now the updated build is ready to run!