Help compiling Darkplaces

[frag.machine]

So, hum... I was trying to compile the latest Darkplaces source (windows, non-SDL) but it's complaining about some missing DirectX 9 header. Then I looked for any instructions on how to solve it in the package and... Nothing. Checked the page... Nope. Checked the Darkplaces Wiki, found a section "compiling the source code", and... not done yet. Can anyone point me at some page, tutorial, help text, anything on how to fix this dependency ?

EDIT:Herp derp. Just found about this. Sorry! Please Spirit, don't yell at me!

[Baker]

Even with Windows, use cmd.exe and navigate to the DarkPlaces source folder.

Type "make". Viola.

[Yeah, not an IDE method ... but should work. Disclaimer: I have a lot of extra tools installed on my machines, so small chance I have something in my "path" that calls gcc from Cygwin/Mingw, but I do not believe it is using that. Disclaimer part 2: This is from memory with obviously the idea that MSVC is installed.]

In my experience the IDE project files for DP are not as good and/or update to date and easy as compiling DP via "make."

[revelator]

If you use standard mingw its missing some of the directx headers you can get the missing ones at the allegro game library site,
but tbh i wonder a bit why they newer fixed it ?.
Mingw64 has a pretty complete directx sdk (upto and including directx11) while mingw only has directx9 and its missing bits and pieces.

Cmd or bash shell is upto preference i think, i like making most work in bash because of its scripting support makes it a ton easier to automate some of the heavier stuff.
Ofc if your into powershell that might be just as good.

[frag.machine]

Thanks Baker and reckless for the tips. Turns out my Visual Studio setup didn't have the DirectX SDK installed (I could swear that I installed it along the XNA SDK long time ago but seems I was wrong, duh). About a chunky 680Mb download later I managed to compile (and even run ! ) the debug version.

But now apparently there's something wrong with this source package (20110628-wgl) because while the original game works fine, if I try to load any mod (dpmod included) I get a crash. Needless to say, the same data files do work flawlessly with my previous darkplaces executable. Oh well, I'll check later if there's some newer stable release on SVN. Thanks again!

[revelator]

i noticed the same with various versions of msvc it seems to be runtime related,
some versions work with msvc8 and up but some make some weird runtime errors in later versions of msvc like 2010.

One of the reasons i stick with mingw it allways uses the standard msvcrt 6 runtime unless explicitly told otherwise.

[Baker]

[mh]

I'm not a fan of what Microsoft have done with 2010. The only really worthwhile thing it brings to the party is the vastly improved intellisense (although 2008 is easy enough to get damn close to fixing - just shut down the Class View pane and you're 75% of the way there). In return for that however you get a monstrously sluggish UI that takes ages to load and ages to do anything reasonable with, a much slower compiler (for C++, C oddly enough seems a mite faster), some bizarre changes with Find and file navigation (when jumping back and forth between lines of code using the cursor keys), an unaccpetable change to include and lib directory setup, and a few other things I can't remember off the top of my head.

Everyone should have a fairly recent DXSDK installed. Even if you're not doing any DirectX coding, there is a lot of useful info in it, and it's easier and faster to search than online. Knowing some D3D will make you a better OpenGL programmer too (and vice-versa, of course).

[frag.machine]

[Baker]

[revelator]

depends a bit if you used the mingw64 compiler it certainly does check for directx (mingw64 supports msvc pragmas).
one but though as far as i know darkplaces only asks for directx in relation to SDL since SDL uses a few headers from it.
I might be wrong on later versions.

[mh]

Recent DPs (don't know about the most recent) offer a cvar-selectable D3D renderer so they would require a DXSDK to be installed, yeah.