User:DimensionalShambler/Building Chocolate Doom on Windows (alternative build)V3

The official way of building Chocolate Doom on Windows is using Cygwin. However, the Chocolate Doom source code comes with alternative project files for building the code using Code::Blocks and Microsoft Visual Studio, for people who are more comfortable with those environments.

You may find that these project files are sometimes slightly out of date and not up-to-date with the latest changes to the source code. You're welcome to use these alternative build systems if you're more comfortable with them, but bear in mind that they are "unofficial".

Step 0: Obtaining the source code
The easiest way to download the source code is to download a ZIP of the source code for a particular release directly from the GitHub chocolate-doom page, or select "Clone or Download → Download ZIP" to download a ZIP of the source for the current development state.

[FIXME: need to get sdl2-branch ]

[FIXME: getting the source via git clone inside VC2015 ]

Step 1: Getting Visual Studio Community Edition
You can download Visual Studio Community Edition 2015 free from visualstudio.com.

Step 2: Installing the Development Libraries
You need to download the Windows VC Development libraries for SDL2, SDL2_Mixer and SDL2_Net and libpng[ fixme: libpng VC needed ]

Each of these ZIPs contains a sub-folder "include" and another "lib". You need to extract the contents of "include" from each ZIP into "msvc/include" in your Chocolate Doom source folder. You also need to extract all files under "lib/x86" from each ZIP into "msvc/lib".

[ fIXME: instructions for libpng. oR just use NuGet for all of them ]

Step 3: Compiling Chocolate Doom
The Chocolate Doom source code includes a Visual Studio solution within the "msvc" directory. Double click on the file "Chocolate.sln".

When Visual Studio starts up, select "Build" from one of the drop-down menus.