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Compiling Wesnoth on Windows using Visual Studio

The current minimum Visual Studio version required for compiling Wesnoth is Visual Studio 2015 (VC14). Compilation is also supported with Visual Studio 2017 (VC15) and later versions. However, since we keep the project files in the Git repository targeted at the minimum version, it is recommended you duplicate the wesnoth/projectfiles/VC14 directory and rename it after the Visual Studio version with which you wish to build.

Prerequisites

We maintain a handy GitHub repository with all the external libraries (see INSTALL.md) Wesnoth requires. It has various branches corresponding to the Visual Studio version you are building with. Be sure to use the libraries from the appropriate branch!

What to do

  1. Clone or download a snapshot of the aforementioned dependency repository. If you do the latter, be sure you've downloaded the snapshot for the correct branch, not master! Either way, it should be cloned/unpacked into the same directory as Wesnoth. If you have Wesnoth cloned in Documents/wesnoth, for example, the dependency pack should be at Documents/external. Note that external is the name of the resulting directory by default. DO NOT RENAME IT!

  2. If you cloned the repository, switch to the the version-appropriate branch now.

  3. Return to wesnoth/projectfiles and duplicate the VC14 folder if applicable, as mentioned above.

  4. Open projectfiles/VCXX/wesnoth.sln in Visual Studio. At this point, it may prompt you to re-target the projectfiles for your current VS and Windows versions. Do so; the build will likely fail if you do not.

  5. Optional: by default, Wesnoth's WML unit tests are run after each build. This can be quite annoying and/or time-consuming if you build regularly. They can be disabled by heading to the wesnoth projectfile's properties, under Build Events → Post-Build Event. Delete the value in the "Command Line" field.

  6. That's it! You can now go ahead and start the build (Build → Build Solution).

  7. Important! After building, copy all the files from external/dll into the same directory (wesnoth/ by default) as the newly built executable . The game will not start if you fail to do this.

Manually updating the external dependencies

We do our best to keep the build dependency repository up-to-date with the latest versions of the libraries within, as well as synced with any build requirement changes. If you want to build with a different version of a certain library, however, you can fetch the relevant files at the links below:

The other libraries require complicated compilation procedures too in-depth to document here.