Windows install

The client is developed in the MinGW environment, using the Code::Block IDE. Notice that the project uses git submodules. You need to do git submodule init and git submodule update.

1. Install MinGW at C:\MinGW. The set-up currently depends on this path. Select the option to include the c++ compiler and MSYS basic system (the minimal system). The developer toolkit isn’t needed. This will install the compilers and standard libraries. The installer program is rather small, but will automatically download what is needed. gcc version 4.7 is required. Optionally, install the core utils with mingw-get install msys-coreutils.
2. Use the MinGW installation tool to also install the dev version of mingw32-pthreads-win32.
3. Clone the Ephenation client source code git clone https://github.com/larspensjo/ephenation-client.git.
4. Optionally: Install Code::Blocks. Do not use the latest official software (10.05, which is over a year old). Instead, use a nightly build (not the DEBUGGER version). As mentioned in that announcement, simply download the unicode windows wxWidget dll also. Code::Blocks doesn’t have to be actually installed, it is enough to download and unpack it somewhere, like C:\CodeBlocks. The dll can be unpacked into the CodeBlocks directory.
5. Configure Code::Blocks (development IDE) to use the gcc compiler tool chain. This is done in Settings/Compiler and debugger/Toolchain executables. However, It is probably automatically detected first time. Test with a small console project to make sure everything works as expected. In the same place as the toolchain settings, choose the tab “Additional paths”. Add “C:\MinGW\bin” and “C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\bin”. This is needed when the application is run from Code::Blocks to find all DLLs that are used.
6. Download the libogg library (version 1.3.0 or better), and unpack it temporarily. Start a MinGW shell (run as administrator!), and go to the source code of libogg. Do as listed below, which will install the libogg in the MinGW system. Default is in /usr/local, where MinGW does not look (by default). That is the reason for the --prefix=/usr argument. (This may take some time ~approx 20 minutes on Vista/Single core CPU)
   ./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make install
7. Download and unpack the libvorbis library (version 1.3.X) (from the same place as libogg). Again, start a MinGW shell. Again, do as follows:
   ./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make install
8. Download and unpack the latest GLEW library, The OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library. The current version used by Ephenation is 1.7.0 or better. Easiest is to download a pre-compiled release and install it to /include and /lib as documented.
9. Execute the "contrib\win32\OpenAL\redist\oalinst.exe" to install the OPENAL.DLL.

Now everything should be prepared. There are two alternative ways to build the project. From Code::Blocks, open the project definition (EphenationClient.cbp) in the EphenationClient folder. The project has already defined compiler flags, making sure all newly installed libraries and header files will be found. To compile, choose either “Debug” or “Release”. There are still some libraries that are automatically included in the ephenation-client source code, in the folder “contrib/win32”. Those do not need to be downloaded separately. They should work as is, but can possibly be updated to newer versions if appropriate. The reason for this is that these libraries do not have installation scripts that can be used for the MinGW environment.

It is also also possible to compile directly from the MinGW command prompt: “make -f Makefile.mingw”.