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[tools] libpng icu glbinding sdl2 sdl2-ttf sdl2-mixer[core,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/windows/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/windows/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.
  • Take a look at our CI build:
Tagged with: Development