Windows Step By Step Compilation

This is a basic, step-by-step guide to getting SLADE compiling in Windows, using Visual Studio Express 2013. I have tested the steps in a fresh Windows 7 VM and it all worked fine at the time of writing.

1. Setup and Install Tools

Install Visual Studio

Download VS2013 Express for Windows Desktop from here. Installation should be relatively straightforward, as there are no real installation options. It's a reasonably large download so may take a while.

Install TortoiseGit

Download TortoiseGit from here and install it using default settings.

For TortoiseGit to work, you'll also need to download and install Git for Windows from here. Get the latest 'Full Installer', and you can uncheck the 'Windows Explorer Integration' option during setup if you don't want to clutter up your explorer context menu with git stuff you probably won't use.

2. Setup Required Libraries

Create a folder somewhere on your hard drive to contain all the libraries and SLADE sources, if you don't already have something like this. For example purposes, this guide will assume the directory created is C:\Dev. Within this folder, create another one for all the libraries, eg. C:\Dev\Libs

wxWidgets

Download the latest wxWidgets (Windows 7z) release from here (currently 3.0.0). Extract the 7z to the libs folder, eg. c:\Dev\Libs\wxWidgets-3.0.0

Next, open the wxWidgets folder and open the file build\msw\wx_vc10.sln within. It should open in VS2013, click OK to upgrade the solution.

On the toolbar there should be a dropdown menu with 'Debug' selected - change this to 'Release' instead, then select 'Build → Build Solution' from the menu.

SFML

The current release of SFML is 2.1. Unfortunately this version has a bug that can cause weird focus issues with OpenGL windows in SLADE, so I do not recommend using it.

For now, I have made a VS2013 build of SFML 2.2 from it's github repository: http://slade.mancubus.net/files/libs/SFML-2.2-VS2013.7z

Extract this to a folder under Libs eg. C:\Dev\Libs\SFML-2.2

FluidSynth

Due to its reliance on GLib, FluidSynth is a huge pain to compile in Windows. Additionally, when it is compiled, anything using it will also need the GLib DLLs to run. This is obviously highly undesirable, but luckily there are precompiled binaries available that have GLib statically linked, meaning no extra DLLs are needed. I've put up these precompiled binaries here: http://slade.mancubus.net/files/libs/fluidsynth-1.1.3-win32.zip

Extract this to the libs folder eg. C:\Dev\Libs (the zip already contains a fluidsynth folder so there is no need to create one)

FreeImage

Go to http://freeimage.sourceforge.net/download.html and download the 'FreeImage DLL' zip. Extract this to the libs folder eg. C:\Dev\Libs

3. Download SLADE Sources

Open the folder created at the start of Step 2 (C:\Dev). Copy the following URL to the clipboard: https://github.com/sirjuddington/SLADE.git

Right click within the folder and select 'Git Clone...' - the previously copied URL should automatically show up in the URL text box. Click OK to get the SLADE sources.

4. Setup and Compile SLADE

Open the file SLADE-VS2012.sln, change 'Debug' to 'Release' as with wxWidgets.

Setup library path macros

So that Visual Studio knows where to look for the required libraries we downloaded earlier, you will need to set up some macros to point to them (the SLADE project file uses these macros to set include/lib directories).

• Select 'View → Other Windows → Property Manager'
• Open 'Release | Win32' and double click Microsoft.Cpp.Win32.user
• Under the 'User Macros' section, click 'Add Macro'
• Enter FLUIDSYNTH for the name, and the directory you extracted fluidsynth to as the value, eg. C:\Dev\Libs\fluidsynth-1.1.3-win32
• Tick 'Set this macro as an environment variable in the build environment' and click OK
• Repeat the above 2 steps for FREEIMAGE (C:\Dev\Libs\FreeImage), SFML (C:\Dev\Libs\SFML-2.2-VS2013) and WXWIN (C:\Dev\Libs\wxWidgets-3.0.0)
• Click OK to close the property pages window
• Right click Microsoft.Cpp.Win32.user and select 'Save'

This should set up all the needed macros to compile SLADE

Compile

Now select 'Build → Build Solution' in the menu and SLADE should begin compiling. If all goes well, you will find the executable and data in the dist folder.

You will also need the dll files that come with the SLADE official release: FreeImage.dll, libfluidsynth.dll, libsndfile-1.dll and openal32.dll. All these should also be available in the relevant library folders you extracted them to earlier.