Compilation with CMake or Visual Studio

Introduction#

OpenFusion comes with a regular Makefile and also a CMakeLists file. This allows the user to choose what they want to use to compile. In general, the Makefile will always work out of the box, whereas the CMakeLists file may not work for a few commits if a large change is made to the codebase’s file structure.

The advantage of using CMake is that CMake will create customized build files for whatever build environment you’d like to make. Depending on the context, it may be easier to set up than using the regular Makefile.

All Environments#

Assuming you have a working build environment for C++ set up and cmake installed, you can simply generate the project files into another directory. The .gitignore file ignores a directory named build, so it is recommended to generate the build files there:

cmake -B build    # Assuming you are in the OpenFusion source directory

Please note that the OpenFusion CMakeLists prevents you from creating an in-source build as it pollutes the source directory and makes things annoying for everyone. You can put your build files anywhere, obviously.

Visual Studio#

If you are a Visual Studio user, you should probably use CMake to build OpenFusion. There exist forks of OpenFusion maintained by other people that may not necessarily always be up-to-date, if you’d like to go that route instead. Otherwise, continue on if you’d like to use CMake.

Install the CMake tools#

To begin, make sure you have Visual Studio with the CMake tools installed. If you don’t have Visual Studio, you can grab it from Microsoft’s website. The “Community” version will do just fine for OpenFusion. Simply install “C++ CMake tools for Windows”.

If you already have Visual Studio installed, you can make sure you have CMake tools installed (or install them) by clicking “Modify” on your installation of Visual Studio, and checking for “C++ CMake tools for Windows” under the “Individual Components” tab.

Start the Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt#

In your start menu, search for “Developer Command Prompt for VS 2019” (or the version of VS you’re using). After that, simply cd to your source directory as you’d normally do in a command prompt window. Finally, generate the build files as detailed in the “All Environments” section:

cmake -B build

You’ll find OpenFusion.sln inside the build directory, all ready to go. From there, you should be able to use the Visual Studio solution as if it were a regular C++ project in Visual Studio, more or less.

Additionally, you can compile the project straight from the command line using cmake’s --build flag, eg:

cmake --build build

You’ll find the output binary in the bin directory. Run it like so:

.\bin\winfusion.exe

For unix environments (non-windows), the binary will be named fusion

Protocol Version Selection#

OpenFusion supports multiple packet versions (20100104 and 20100728 at the time of writing). To build with these versions, you can define PROTOCOL_VERSION. For example:

cmake -B build -DPROTOCOL_VERSION=728

Notice that the protocol versions are month and day, without the leading zero. Therefore, 20100104 would be 104.