Windows Development

Here's straightforward instructions on how to set up a complete windows environment for building a distribution. If you just want to hack on the game, you only need these instructions up to big step 3. These are here to help newcomers to get into hacking the trunk quickly, but their also here to document how releases are built for windows.

There are 4 big steps, each comprising of many little steps. Each step is for building the trunk. Building a release tarball based on the trunk should follow logically from here, but may not. Consult specific release documentation for more information on building a release tarball, if it's there.

Installing the IDE

We use Code::Blocks. The trunk should be built with the latest available version (currently 10.05, probably best to stick to that one).

0.2.8 builds are done with the ancient 1.0RC2; The original instructions can be found here.

To build and run the game, you will need Python and Code::Blocks. Code::Blocks itself requires MingW, and additional tools available from MingW will be needed to build the trunk. Here's a list, in no particular order.

• Code::Blocks with mingw (best just install the combined package)
• Python. 2.4 is known to work, as is 2.7.
• NSIS is needed to build installers.
• If you don't want to be restricted to building released, zipped sources, a way to fetch our current source. Two choices:
  • Subversion client. Tortoise-SVN gives you a nice GUI around SVN, but is considered optional. Note however that svn support on the trunk is on its way out and you should rather pick
  • bazaar. Again, Tortiose-BZR is a GUI you can use.
• Old entry: "You'll need gcc, bison, and swig, at the very least to build the trunk. A release tarball may not need bison and swig." Z-Man can't remember installing bison, gcc is part of mingw which comes with code::blocks, and swig is not currently needed. So feel free to ignore this.

Satisfying Dependencies

Satisfying dependencies in Windows is very easy. You just download the most recent release of the winlibs.zip file to build the trunk, generally. Sometimes that won't work, such as when the trunk requires new libraries that aren't required by the most recent release. If you're building from the trunk, you'll want to checkout the winlibs module.

This is early to talk about checking out the source, but it's needed. The directory structure you need looks like this:

• Armagetron Project directory (you create it, you name it what you want)
  • armagetronad
  • winlibs

You'll create this directory structure by either unzipping a source release and a winlibs archive, or by using subversion to checkout the two modules listed. For reference, the url for the modules is:

armagetronad

https://armagetronad.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/armagetronad/armagetronad/trunk/armagetronad

winlibs

https://armagetronad.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/armagetronad/armagetronad/trunk/winlibs

That's all there is to it.

Well, not really. We need to figure out how to get Ruby in there, and Boost is a bit problematic right now. Those two are the main reasons the trunk doesn't build, at the time of writing. (However, there are miscellaneous problems in the build files from regular changes made in Linux that have been migrated to Mac OS X, but due to lack of developer interest, and lack of developers, haven't yet been migrated to Windows)

Building Armagetron Advanced

Building the game isn't as straightforward as the last step. Sorry. Here's what you do, assuming a fresh checkout:

1. Run win32\update_version.bat
2. Start Code::Blocks
3. Open win32\code_blocks\ArmagetronAd.workspace
4. Build
5. Run win32\makedist.bat

Now you should be able to play the game.

Gotchas:

• update_version.bat and makedist.bat both need to know where python is installed. The easiest way to deal with this is to put python in your path. In Windows 2000, right-click My Computer, select Properties. Go to the Advanced tab, and in the middle you have Environment Variables. Open that. Find the Path variable and edit it, by putting ";C:\Python24" on the end (if you used the default installation location. If you didn't, put the right path to python.exe).
• Not running the batch files will result in version.h not being found while building. If you see that error, it's because you didn't run update_version.bat.

Building a Self-Extracting Installer

Right now, nobody knows how to build an installer from the trunk. Z-man knew back in 0.3.0, and hopefully he'll chime in and tell us how he did it then.

1. Download and install NSIS http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Download
2. Open the file: win32/armagetronad.nsis

Troubleshooting

If you want to build armagetronad (tested with 0.2.8.2 branch and 0.3_alpha8870, target dedicated) in windows you may have this errors:

• src/defs.h:105: error: new declaration `bool isblank(int)': in file armagetronad\src\defs.h change:
  • inline bool isblank(int x){ return ((x == ' ') || (x == '\t')); } to //inline bool isblank(int x){ return ((x == ' ') || (x == '\t')); }

In other words, comment the line. This function doesn't seem to exist in Windows or Solaris 2.8.