When I was running Windows, I had compiled it successfully on VC++ 2008, 2010, 2013 Community Edition and I think VC 6.0 (Project64 1.4, plain C).
As long as you're trying to build with Visual Studio 2010 or anything newer, always just open the normal
.sln file. The
.vcproj files and the older 2008
.sln file are just there for building with pre-2010 Visual Studio which is good if you happen to have those versions. I have never downloaded VS2015; however, I don't think it matters if you use that to compile.
Falkoner said:
I haven't done C++ in a few years, so I'm a bit rusty on build configurations, so if there's a newb-friendly tutorial, I'd greatly appreciate it.
Once the SLN file is open, it's really just a matter of Ctrl+Shift+B to build the EXE + plugins. Compiling stuff doesn't really require any programming knowledge.
You might or might not have reason to care to even change the build configuration first. Not sure about VS2015, but in VS2013 I know it's "Configuration Manager..." from under the "Build" menu in Visual Studio.
Things you can select from this configuration window:
- Whether to do a "Debug" or "Release" build. ("Debug" is the default and less prone to problems from bad coding, but "Release" binaries are usually smaller, omit junk sections and have good optimizations.)
- Whether to build as x86 32-bit or 64-bit Windows EXE and plugins. 32-bit x86 is default.
- Which components to check or uncheck the box for to skip building--skip building the EXE, Glide64, etc.. You might want to mess with this if N-Rage is really the only thing you care to get generated, but actually you might want to not mess with this because a lot of the other non-self-explanatory components are static library dependencies to get everything to resolve during link time. You would then have wasted your time unchecking all the boxes except for N-Rage, only to see that there are linkage errors with generating the N-Rage DLL and end up having to re-check most of everything until the next build attempt succeeds. Other than time wasted, though, it won't hurt to do trial and error if you feel like experimenting. (I could probably give partial guesses as to which ones should [not] be checked, but a lot of it is garbage static-linking being done by new stuff zilmar changes every so often, and I really don't care to keep up.)
