layout: default title: "Building Scotty3D" nav_order: 3 permalink: /build/

Building Scotty3D

Ubuntu Build Status

MacOS Build Status

Windows Build Status

To get a copy of the codebase, see Git Setup.

Note: the first build on any platform will be very slow, as it must compile most dependencies. Subsequent builds will only need to re-compile your edited Scotty3D code.

Linux

The following packages (ubuntu/debian) are required, as well as CMake and either gcc or clang:

sudo apt install pkg-config libgtk-3-dev libsdl2-dev

The version of CMake packaged with apt may be too old (we are using the latest version). If this is the case, you can install the latest version through pip:

pip install cmake
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin

Finally, to build the project:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo ..
make -j4

The same process should also work modified for your distro/package manager of choice. Note that if you are using Wayland, you may need to set the environment variable SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland when running Scotty3D for acceptable performance.

Notes:

You can instead use cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug .. to build in debug mode, which, while far slower, makes the debugging experience much more intuitive.
You can replace 4 with the number of build processes to run in parallel (set to the number of cores in your machine for maximum utilization).
If you have both gcc and clang installed and want to build with clang, you should run CC=clang CXX=clang++ cmake .. instead.

Windows

The windows build is easiest to set up using the Visual Studio compiler (for now). To get the compiler, download and install the Visual Studio 2019 Build Tools here. If you want to instead use the full Visual Studio IDE, you can download Visual Studio Community 2019 here. Be sure to install the "Desktop development with C++" component.

You can download CMake for windows here.

Once the Visual Studio compiler (MSVC) is installed, you can access it by running "Developer Command Prompt for VS 2019," which opens a terminal with the utilities in scope. The compiler is called cl. You can also import these utilities in any terminal session by running the script installed at C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvars64.bat.

We also provide a simple script, build_win.bat, that will automatically import the compiler and build the project. You should be able to simply run it in the project root to build. Scotty3D.exe will be generated under build/RelWithDebInfo/.

If you want to build manually, the steps (assuming MSVC is in scope) are:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build . --config RelWithDebInfo

You can also use --config Debug to build in debug mode, which, while far slower, makes the debugging experience much more intuitive. If you swap this, be sure to make a new build directory for it.

Finally, also note that cmake .. generates a Visual Studio solution file in the current directory. You can open this solution (Scotty3D.sln) in Visual Studio itself and use its interface to build, run, and debug the project. (Using the Visual Studio debugger or the provided VSCode launch options for debugging is highly recommended.)

MacOS

The following packages are required, as well as CMake and clang. You can install them with homebrew:

brew install pkg-config sdl2

To build the project:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo ..
make -j4

Notes:

You can instead use cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug .. to build in debug mode, which, while far slower, makes the debugging experience much more intuitive.
You can replace 4 with the number of build processes to run in parallel (set to the number of cores in your machine for maximum utilization).

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