Compiling VDrift

Compiling VDrift is different depending on the operating system on which it is compiled.

Linux

Prerequisites

Make sure you have all the required libraries and build tools. Make sure you also have the development files for each of the libraries.

The required build tools include:

• g++ - The GNU C++ compiler
• scons - A replacement for Make

The required libraries include:

• libsdl - Simple Direct Media Layer
• libglew - OpenGL extension utilities
• sdl-gfx - Graphics drawing primitives library for SDL
• sdl-image - Image file loading library for SDL
• sdl-net - Low-level network library for SDL
• vorbisfile - File loading library for the ogg vorbis format
• libvorbis-dev - The Vorbis General Audio Compression Codec

Your Linux distribution may have different package names and/or bundled differently. The list above should give enough information to search for applicable packages within your distribution's package manager.

For Ubuntu, all the required packages may be installed using this command:

sudo apt-get install g++ scons libsdl-gfx1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-net1.2-dev libvorbis-dev libglew-dev

Bullet

As of SVN R2358, no steps are required to build bullet and you can continue to the next section.

For the 2009-02-15 release, Bullet is now built by SCons along with the rest of VDrift. The only step required is to expand the Bullet source archive:

tar zxvf bullet-2.73-sp1.tgz

Note: For older versions of VDrift, you will need to follow the Old Method of Compiling Bullet.

SCons

As of the 2005-10-02 release, VDrift no longer uses ./configure, make, etc. (autotools). Now the project is built with SCons. You may want to read a little about Using SCons.

There are two ways to use SCons. The first way is to install scons on your system through your package manager, then you can use it simply by the name of the program, "scons". The second way is to use the scons-local package (included with VDrift) which will do the same thing but doesn't require that you install scons on your system. To do this, you must move the scons-local-0.96.95.tar.gz archive from tools to the root vdrift folder, un-tar the archive, and then use the ./scons.py command instead of scons.

Get the Code

You can get the code from a source package for a particular version, or you can get the development version.

Source Package

Download the latest VDrift Linux source package. All the files in the package are in a directory called vdrift-version-src where version is something like 2005-10-02.

Unpack the archive.

tar jxvf vdrift-2005-10-02-src.tar.bz2

Enter directory

Now change directories into the location of your newly created VDrift source tree.

cd vdrift-2005-10-02-src

Development version

You can check out the development version of VDrift from our Subversion repository.

Once you've checked out the code, enter the directory Subversion created.

cd vdrift

Optional: Using scons-local instead of installing SCons

If you have decided not to install SCons on your system, you can use scons-local. To set it up, do the following:

tar zxvf tools/scons-local-0.96.1.tar.gz

Note: Some of the following steps refer to the scons command, you should now replace that with ./scons.py.

Compiling

To compile VDrift, just use the scons command.

scons

Options

You may need to use one or more compile options. To compile with optimization for a certain platform, you can use the arch option.

scons arch=a64

Compiling VDrift in release mode will turn off debugging options, and enable more compiler optimizations. VDrift runs much more quickly in release mode.

scons release=1

Note: These options are probably best left off the first time you compile. If you have problems compiling or running VDrift, it is easier to debug with them off. Once you verify that VDrift is compiling, then add these to improve performance.

Installing

VDrift does not need to be installed to work and you can run it from the folder where you compiled it. If you do want to install, use the SCons build target install. This command must be run as root.

scons install

Note: The scons install process was broken for several releases and may fail to install needed datafiles. If scons install doesn't result in a working installation, manually re-copy the data files to the installed destination folder.

Installation Options

You can change the installation prefix. By default, VDrift is installed to /usr/share/games/vdrift, but if you wanted it to go in /usr/local/share/games/vdrift, you can change the prefix setting.

scons install prefix=/usr/local

Note: There are many more build and install options, see the Using SCons page for more information.

Mac OS X

Prerequisites

The VDrift Mac OS X project requires Xcode version 2.2 with the "10.4 Universal SDK" and the "X11 SDK" installed.

Download

Get the VDrift source code, either from the latest source release on the VDrift downloads page, or the development version.

Build

Finally open tools/osx/vdrift.xcodeproj and hit "Build" from XCode's "Build" menu.

Windows

In order to build VDrift for Windows, you must set up the tools to build the software, build Bullet and VDrift, and then install VDrift into a runtime folder.

Install and Configure Build Tools

To build VDrift on Windows you'll need working installations of MinGW, MSYS and MSYS-DTK, Python, and SCons.

Note: The versions listed for these tools were the ones used at time of this writing (current stable versions of all packages), there may be new versions. This is a known working configuration.

MinGW

• Download MinGW 5.1.3
• Run the installer.
• When asked to select components for install, you only need the base system and the g++ compiler.
• Choose the default install location.

MSYS

• Download MSYS 1.0.10
• Run the installer.
• Choose the default install location.
• When presented with a terminal asking if you want to continue with the post-install, type y, then press enter.
• When asked if MinGW is installed, enter C:/MinGW, then press enter.
• The MSYS post install script should find your MinGW installation now and configure itself.

MSYS DTK

• Download MSYS-DTK 1.01
• Run the installer and accept all the defaults.

Python

• Download Python 2.5.1
• Run the installer and accept all the defaults.

SCons

• SCons 0.97
• Run the installer. It should find your Python installation, accept all defaults.

Download VDrift Source and Data

Get the VDrift source code and data, either from the latest source release on the VDrift downloads page, or the development version.

Note: From this point on the directory in which you checked out VDrift will be referred to as the root VDrift directory. The development environment setup script puts this in an environment variable $VDRIFT_DIR.

Building

To build VDrift you must use the MSYS terminal, compile the Bullet library, and compile VDrift itself.

• Launch MSYS by clicking Start -> Programs -> MinGW -> MSYS -> msys.
• Change directories to the spot where you checked VDrift out. If your username is Administrator and you put it on your Desktop in a directory named VDrift, you would enter this command:

cd /c/Documents\ and\ Settings/Administrator/Desktop/VDrift

• Now, to build VDrift, run the command:

build_vdrift.sh

Run VDrift

• Move or copy the VDrift data to a directory named data within the root VDrift directory. This can be done in a few different ways, depending on how you obtained the VDrift data. You could check it out directly here, or you could check it out in another place and use TortoiseSVN to export it to this location. If you downloaded a VDrift data archive you can extract it here, or extract it elsewhere and then move or copy the necessary files to runtime. In the end, just make sure you have a directory structure with paths like VDrift/data/cars/, VDrift/data/tracks/, etc.

Running

Now, to run VDrift, you just need to double-click on the file vdrift.exe within the root VDrift directory.