Compiling

This page assumes you’re going to be building from sources. If you just want to play the latest stable version without working on the game itself, simple go for the packaged binary Installation.

1. Install Git. Refer to the official documentation and GitHub Help if you are new to it.
2. Get the source

   git clone git://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA.git

3. Build it (with msbuild, make or Visual Studio 2010 C# Express, MonoDevelop if you like an IDE)
4. Enjoy.

The game won’t start if it can’t find some external dependencies. You can find them in thirdparty/ folder which has to be copied into in OpenRA root folder. Windows might need some extra DLLs that you can just copy from OpenRA’s binary packages. See Game Content on how to obtain the content files.
Under Linux you can use `gacutil` tool (root permissions are required) to cache all DLLs so you will not have to care about them next time when you compile OpenRA:

gacutil -i <*.dll>

Where <*.dll> is every .dll file you can find in thirdparty/.

We run in windowed mode by default, even at “full screen”, because the debugging experience is much nicer (you don’t lose your device when you Alt+Tab, etc)