Building Widelands in Visual Studio

This article explains how to use Microsoft Visual Studio to build and develop Widelands on Windows

Prerequisites

• Install python
• Install Visual Studio together with the English language pack (required for vcpkg).
• Download and install vcpkg
  • Run bootstrap-vcpkg.bat -disableMetrics first.
  • Then run vcpkg integrate install to integrate vcpkg with Visual Studio.
  • Install all dependencies (Note the selected static triplet): vcpkg install --triplet=x64-windows-static asio gettext libpng icu glbinding sdl2 sdl2-ttf sdl2-mixer[libvorbis,libflac,mpg123] sdl2-image[libjpeg-turbo,tiff] graphite2 harfbuzz opusfile libwebp
  • If you want to save space, you can safely delete the buildtrees folder.
• Download the latest static release zip of gettext.
  • Extract the contained bin folder to [vcpkg]/installed/x64-windows-static/bin

Project configuration

• Copy utils/win32/CMakeSettings.json to the top level directory to use with Visual Studio.
• Launch Visual Studio and select the Widelands root as workspace.
  • CMake should automatically start parsing the project and picking up the vcpkg toolchain file.
  • Then start compilation
• Copy utils/win32/launch.vs.json to the .vs/ directory as start-configuration.

Troubleshooting

• vcpkg fails to build a package
  • mpg123: vcpkg --triplet=x64-windows-static install yasm-tool:x86-windows
  • remove the package (or its dependency parent) from the install list and install it separately afterwards. vcpkg sometimes has problems resolving dependency chains.
  • search for the package in the issue list and see, if a recent update broke it.