README.WINDOWS

README for Windows (32- and 64-bit) platforms
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**Compilers**
BZFlag uses Microsoft Visual C++ for its prebuilt binary releases and project
files are provided for it. The current compiler used is Visual C++ 2010 (VC10).
Both the full and express versions will build just fine. There may be some
issues building the bzflag-dependencies package with newer compilers at this
time. We will work to correct that in future versions of the game/dependencies.

It's a bit harder to find the express version these days since they tended to
only keep the one or two more recent versions on their site, and they've since
released a full-featured community version of 2015. You can currently still
download Visual Studio 2010 Express Edition from here:
  http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9709969

Because of an issue with the DirectX SDK installer, you may be unable to finish
the installation. This is because it tries to install an older version of the
Visual C++ 2010 runtime, which fails if a newer version is already installed.
This causes the DirectX SDK install to fail and rollback all changes. So, you
can either try uninstalling all 2010 versions of the runtime and then reinstall
the latest version of them afterwards, or you can just start with a clean
system and follow these install steps:
1) Install DirectX SDK
2) Install Visual Studio 2010
3) If it did not include Service Pack 1, install it:
  Full ISO: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=210710
  Web Installer: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=23691
4) Enable updates for other Microsoft products (Microsoft Update) and install
   any available important updates

**Targets**
There are a total of 4 build targets in the VC projects. There are targets
for Release and Debug, and each has a 32-bit and 64-bit version. At this time,
only 32-bit is supported. Our dependencies don't build correctly on 64-bit with
our current script. Also, there's no real performance advantage in having a
64-bit BZFlag client as the game doesn't use much RAM.

**Required Libraries**

You will need the windows DirectX SDK
  http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=6812

Various third-party libraries are needed, which are packaged in our
bzflag-dependencies repository. Either grab a pre-built binary package from
the releases section, or build the dependencies from source as described at
the repository. The BZFlag build expects that an environment variable called
BZ_DEPS exist and point to dependencies repository directory (the one that
would contain the one or more output directories and src directory containing
the third-party libraries)
  https://github.com/BZFlag-Dev/bzflag-dependencies

NSIS 2.46 is needed to build an installer, which is built as part of a release
build.
  http://nsis.sourceforge.net/

**Running and Debugging**
By default the compiler will copy the compiled executables to the root level
of the source drive ( the same place that the data dir is at). From there
you can simply double click the application to run it. If you wish to debug
the program, you must set the debug executable path and working directory
inside VC to use this executable and path.

**Installer**
If you wish to build the full release package using the fullbuild solution,
you will need to have NSIS installed. The built installer will be placed in
the _bin folder for the target in the root of the source tree.