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 libraries can include:

* media-libs/openal - The Open Audio Library
* media-libs/freealut - The OpenAL Utility Toolkit
* media-libs/libsdl - Simple Direct Media Layer
* media-libs/sdl-gfx - Graphics drawing primitives library for SDL
* media-libs/sdl-image - Image file loading library for SDL
* media-libs/sdl-mixer - Simple Direct Media Layer Mixer Library

These are Gentoo Portage specific package names. 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.

SCons

As of the 2005-10-02 release, VDrift no longer uses ./configure, make, etc. (autotools). Now the project is built with SCons which is written in Python and makes much better sense than autotools in many ways. 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, 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 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

Data

You must choose a data package to install, as the source package does not come with any data (not even the minimal set). Make sure to get a data set that is in a tarball (.tar.gz file) and not one of the other kinds of packages available for download on the VDrift downloads page. The filename will be something like "vdrift-VERSION-data-full.tar.bz2" (full data set - all cars and tracks) or "vdrift-VERSION-data-minimal.tar.bz2" (minimal data set - small download size).

Before you can install VDrift, you must unpack the data so that it's in the source directory. If you downloaded the correct package, the data can be unpacked in the same place that the source package was unpacked.

tar jxvf vdrift-2005-10-02-data-full.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 enbale more compiler optimizations.

scons release=1

Installing

To install, use the SCons build target install. This command must be run as root.

scons install

Options

There are a few options it's important to know about when installing VDrift. These include the install location, and the amount of data that is installed. To install the full data set you must turn off the minimal option, which is on by default.

scons install minimal=0

You can also 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.

OS X

Prerequisites

To use the latest development code, you will need a Subversion client, see Getting the development version#Mac OS X.

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

These are the old instructions, new will follow soon

Prerequisites

To build VDrift on Windows you'll need Dev-C++, an IDE (integrated development environment) for Windows that uses the GNU compiler mingw. Download Dev-C++ and install it.

Download

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

Build

Start Dev-C++, and with it open the VDrift project file from the VDrift source package, tools/win/VDrift.dev. Build the project by selecting Compile from the Build menu.