Developing using Visual Studio on Windows

If you prefer to develop on Visual Studio over using Linux, there have been some improvement in this area recently. If you like Linux better, then you can continue to enjoy that. The point here is not to claim that one is better than the other.

On the wiki, we have documented a number of steps that you need to carry out in order to compile using Visual Studio 2013 with the source code changes that were recently committed. The level of documentation is intended for programmes familiar with Visual Studio. The list is not as short as I would like it to be, but it is a first start. At some point we will probably look into providing a package with pre-compiled libraries for building FreeRCT instead of shamelessly referring to OpenTTD-utils for zlib and png. It may also be possible to add some code to CMakeList.txt so that we can just point to where FreeRCT utils bundle is to set up all library paths in one go.

Still, while the current list is a bit long, most steps are only needed on the first compile. If you re-generate the project files, no manual tweaking is needed.



If you are just interested to play in Windows and are not familiar with programming, you can of course try to follow the instructions, but I'm sorry this is just the first step on establishing a development environment for people who like to develop on Windows. But this means that hopefully there will be binaries for you to try later on.