How to build VCMI (Linux/Cmake/MXE)

Compiling VCMI for Windows on Linux

Some developers may want to make Windows builds without dealing with dependencies as it may be headache when you're on Windows. It's possible to setup own cross-compiler toolkit that use MinGW, but that take time and skill. Fortunately there is project called MXE (M cross environment) that make cross compilation easy and work out of box for our engine.

Setting up a MXE cross compiler

Make sure cmake and git is installed on your system as well as all libraries and utils listed under requirements. MXE website have commands that will let install everything needed for almost every distribution.

Once it done clone MXE using git. Then you need to edit "settings.mk" file:

# "settings.mk" not exist by default
# You can create it by running "make" and then aborting it by Ctrl+C
#
# Uncomment "MXE_TARGETS" and make it look like that:
MXE_TARGETS := i686-w64-mingw32.shared

Then you can compile it:

make MXE_PLUGIN_DIRS=plugins/gcc6 -j 9 gcc boost zlib sdl2 sdl2_gfx sdl2_image sdl2_mixer sdl2_ttf ffmpeg qtbase minizip

Depend on your hardware that may take from 20 minutes to more than hour.

Removing "Qt 5" that only used for launcher will drastically reduce compile time:

make MXE_PLUGIN_DIRS=plugins/gcc6 -j 9 gcc boost zlib sdl2 sdl2_gfx sdl2_image sdl2_mixer sdl2_ttf ffmpeg

Compiling VCMI using MXE

First of all create two directories: one for CMake (vcmi-cmake) and other for result build (vcmi-build). Now build would looks like that:

# Clone VCMI repository with submodules
git clone --depth 1 --recursive https://github.com/vcmi/vcmi.git

# Create CMake directory and cd into it
mkdir vcmi-cmake && cd vcmi-cmake

# To build with launcher:
cmake ../vcmi \
-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=/home/test/mxe/usr/i686-w64-mingw32.shared/share/cmake/mxe-conf.cmake \
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/home/test/vcmi-build \
-DENABLE_TEST=0

# Without launcher:
cmake ../vcmi \
-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=/home/test/mxe/usr/i686-w64-mingw32.shared/share/cmake/mxe-conf.cmake \
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/home/test/vcmi-build \
-DENABLE_TEST=0 \
-DENABLE_LAUNCHER=0

# Compile
make -j 9

# Move binaries into target directory
make install

Script for automatic builds

If you want to have automatic build you can grab script that automatically compile and upload builds using MXE.

• Download it from Github Gist.