CrystalSpace, And support/documentation for free windows compilers

[William Tremblay]

     I read through the documentation, and it was fairly well done. I understand CrystalSpace quite well, and definitaly is my choice of game engine out of all the free ones (Irrilicht, Yake, Ogre3d(Ok, well it's just a graphics engine) ).  But the one thing I think it's missing is support for free windows compilers. It only has documented with mingw/GCC which just simply don't have enough syntax checking and debugging (Yeah it's documented with visual C++, but thats not a free compiler).  Microsoft did release a free "Express" edition of Visual C++ (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualC/default.aspx check it out there) but I just couldn't manage to get it to compile with it.  Irrilicht has support for Dev C++ which is great but Irrilicht dosn't have any of the neat physics stuff CrystalSpace has, But it is alot simpler. I learned how to use it within an hour.  Has anyone successfully compiled it in Dev C++ or Microsoft Visual C++ Express Edition (The free one available at link above)? If so can someone explain what libraries I need to download or document it for either of the two compilers? thanks for reading!

   cheers,
    William Tremblay

[rvl_]

Dev C++ is not a compiler, it is IDE. Actually it uses MinGW/GCC for building. After compiling CS plugins (*.dll) & libraries (*.a) with MinGW there are no problems to use them in DevC++ or Codeblocks (another free IDE) to build your own CS application. The same is true for MSVC, then both CS SDK & your application mus be compiled with MSVC.

The HowTo build docs:
MSVC: http://crystalspace3d.org/docs/online/manual/cs_2.4.3.php#2.4.3
MinGW: http://crystalspace3d.org/docs/online/manual/cs_2.4.4.php#2.4.4

[William Tremblay]

Ok thanks, I just started MinGW building it and it's going ok so far, no errors. After I should do the

make install
make distclean

commands right?

     Cheers,
    William tremblay

[William Tremblay]

(Sorry for double post, it's not going to bump it anyways it's at the top but Im not registered so I can't edit)

NOTE: I already did ./configure and make -k all is going

[rvl_]

in principle 'make install'+'make distclean' is not required. You can set directories inside your IDE to point to CS/include for includes & CS/out/msysx86/optimize/libs for libraries. This is more convenient when updating from CVS because 'make all' will compile the changes only instead of whole SDK again.

[jorrit]

The big problem with supporting Dev-C++ is the project files. It appears to be very hard to fit the complex project structure (multiple plugins) into a Dev-C++ project. I haven't tried myself though.

Greetings,