DarkRadiant - Compiling in Windows

To compile the sources in Windows you will need Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition or higher. The Community Edition can be acquired for free and is able to produce both 32 Bit and 64 Bit builds.

You will need a Git client to clone the sources to your machine and install the Windows dependencies package. Then you're set up to compile DarkRadiant in Visual Studio.

Install a Git Client

The main codebase is stored and maintained on github^[1], you'll therefore need a Git client like

• Github Desktop
• TortoiseGit

Download and install the git client into any folder of your preference. After installation it might ask to reboot your machine, as Tortoise integrates into the Explorer shell.

Downlaod Sources and Dependencies

Using Github Desktop

Create your github-login, configure github desktop as desired, especially the default clone path in the options dialog. Browse to the github page of DarkRadiant and click on Clone in Windows]. That's it!

Using TortoiseGit

To prepare the source download, open Windows Explorer and create the folder you want to clone (i.e. download) the sources into. Make sure the folder does not contain spaces. Use your Git client to clone the DarkRadiant repository from github:

Cloning takes a minute or two - after the process is finished your folder should be looking like this:

This is not yet enough to compile DarkRadiant in Windows, you still need to download and extract the dependencies, see the next step.

Download the Dependencies Package

For Windows builds additional dependencies must be downloaded and copied into the source tree. To keep the github source repository small, the dependencies can be downloaded as 7-zipped packages (you can get 7-zip here):

https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/download/2.1.0/w32deps.7z
https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/download/2.1.0/w64deps.7z (needed for x64 builds)

If you're in Windows 7 x64 (or any higher 64 bit variant) you need to download both packages. Download and extract them directly to the directory you cloned the sources to. The resulting folder structure should look like this.

Important: The w32deps/ (or w64deps/) folder must be in the same folder as the radiant/ or include/ folder.

Compile

Start Visual Studio and open the DarkRadiant solution file (.sln) which is ready for you in the tools/msvc2015 folder.

To build a package for the x64 target, make sure to select the x64 platform from the configuration manager's dropdown box (located in Visual Studio's toolbar). If you prefer a 32 bit build, select the Win32 target.

Select release build (unless you want to debug a problem) and hit Ctrl-Shift-B in VC++ to start building the sources or select "Build > Build Solution" from the menus.

Note

If you cloned the sources to C:\Games\DarkRadiant, the application binary will be placed in C:\Games\DarkRadiant\install\DarkRadiant.exe

The project output files are set up in a way to automatically install the binaries in the install/, install/modules/ and install/plugins/ folders. Also, all dependencies from the w32deps/ folder (see previous section) are automatically copied to the install/ folder during the post-build event. If anything goes wrong during compilation, please seek help in the forums.

The build expects the w32deps folder to be located alongside the sources, especially x64 builds expect the w64deps folder to be sitting next to it. See above for how to set up the folders in case you missed that step. For both platforms the output will be placed in the same install/ directory.

(Optional) Compiling the Windows Dependencies

This step is optional and more advanced. You won't need to do this if you just want to compile and run DarkRadiant using the currently maintained version of Visual Studio.

Boost static libraries

Any VC++ compiler version change (e.g. from VC++ 2015 to VC++ 2017) will require a recompile of the boost static libraries which DarkRadiant links against. At the time of writing DarkRadiant is using the following boost libraries:

• boost.filesystem
• boost.regex
• boost.system
• boost.python

Go get the boost sources from their website (http://www.boost.org) and extract them into a new folder. To build the required static libraries, boost provides the bootstrap script which generates the b2.exe file for you.

Prepare for building boost.python

I found it's necessary to have both the x86 and x64 variants of Python 2.6 installed to compile the boost.python library for both 32 and 64 bit platforms. Get the x86 and x64 installer from the Python website and install them. The experience isn't a very smooth one, I ended up adding the include/ and lib/ folders of the respective Python installation to my PATH environment variable (when targeting the x64 platform, I have the corresponding include/ folder from the Python 2.6 x64 installation in my path, and for the x86 build I need to change them before starting the next build process).

I also added the following lines to my project-conf.jam file which is created in the boost root folder by bootstrap.bat. This is said to help boost to find the Python include files, but I'm not entirely sure if this is necessary:

using python : 2.6 : C:\\Python26 ;
using python : 2.6 : C:\\Python26x64 :  :  : <address-model>64 ;

Use DarkRadiant's build scripts

I prepared some batch files which do most of the dirty work for you. As prerequisite make sure that the path to bjam.exe is added to your PATH before invoking the scripts.

• Open a "Developer Command Prompt for VS2015" (from your Start menu)
• Change directories to the folder where you extracted the downloaded boost package to, e.g. c:\downloads\boost_1_61_0
• Run the build scripts from there, e.g. c:\games\darkradiant\tools\scripts\build_boost_libs, assuming that the DarkRadiant SVN trunk has been checked out to c:\games\darkradiant.
• Copy the files from the stage/ folder (which just popped up as a new Explorer window) to your w32deps/boost/libs folder.
• [64 Bit Build]: Use the build_boost_libs.x64 batch file to build the x64 libraries, but beware that this will overwrite the current contents of the stage/ folder.

Build a boost library manually

See main article: Compile the static Boost Libraries in Windows

The *.lib files from the stage/ folder should be copied into your w32deps/boost/lib folder (or the w64deps/boost/lib for Win64 targets) in your darkradiant directory and the linking should succeed.

Compile the support libraries

DarkRadiant is using a lot of third-party libraries like libxml2, libiconv, vorbis, etc.

For Windows I set up custom VC++ solutions to compile most of the libraries directly from the source (as many of those third-party projects don't offer Windows x64 binaries), these projects can be found in the trunk/winbuild branch in SVN. The winbuild folder contains all the sources needed to build the Win32/Win64 dependency binaries. Note that the headers are stored in w32deps, as the main DarkRadiant project needs them there, so w32deps is the place to look for most of the shared headers.

There are VC++ project files in the msvc2015 folder which work best when the winbuild folder is checked out as subfolder to the trunk/darkradiant working copy, next to your w32deps/w64deps directories, as indicated above. To check out the winbuild folder:

1. Right-click your C:\Games folder >> SVN Checkout...
2. Select https://svn.code.sf.net/p/darkradiant/code/trunk/winbuild to C:\Games\DarkRadiant\winbuild

The folder structure should then look like this:

C:\Games\DarkRadiant
C:\Games\DarkRadiant\w32deps
C:\Games\DarkRadiant\w64deps [optional for x64 builds]
C:\Games\DarkRadiant\winbuild

This way, the VC++ projects place their binaries in the correct location in the w32deps/w64deps folder and you can compile DarkRadiant right off the bat.

Program Database Files (.pdb)

When debugging a DarkRadiant crashdump, you'll need the program database files to get substantial information out of it, so it's vital to save the .pdb files right after compilation, otherwise they won't match against the signatures in the crashdump.

As far as the w32deps/w64deps dependencies are concerned, I've zipped up all the .pdb files and stored them on the FTP:

• VC++ 2015 - x86: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/download/2.1.0/w32deps.pdbs.7z
• VC++ 2015 - x64: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/download/2.1.0/w64deps.pdbs.7z

See also / Links

• DarkRadiant - Compilation Guide
• Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition

Notes

1. The win32 and win64 dependencies are maintained in SVN at SourceForge, but you won't need to check out those unless you're a Windows developer and want to work on the Windows dependencies. If anything substantial changes within these they are zipped and uploaded to github's release area. Linux folks don't need these at all.