supertux/INSTALL.md

Install instructions for SuperTux - https://supertux.org/

Last update: September 2, 2016

Binaries

We try to provide precompiled binaries of SuperTux for a number of platforms. You should check https://supertux.org/download.html for the packages and instructions on how to install them. If there are no prebuilt binaries for your platform, then you might still be able to compile the source code yourself. In this case read the next sections.

Requirements

To build SuperTux from source, you need to have a number of tools and libraries installed. Note that most of these things should already be available prepackaged and optimized for your distribution, it is recommended that you check your distribution first before downloading from the websites. You can also check https://github.com/SuperTux/wiki/blob/master/Building-SuperTux.md for up-to-date build instructions for a variety of different platforms and distributions.

• General development tools:
  • C++ compiler (choose one of the two options below):
  • gcc compiler suite version 3.2 or newer (including g++)
  • LLVM compiler (you probably want the clang frontend too)
  • GNU Binutils (or the BSD/OS X equivalent)
  • a shell and common POSIX command line tools
  • Note: To get these tools, you can install build-essential on Debian-based distros, base-devel on Arch-based distros and the Xcode Command Line tools on OS X.
• CMake 3.1 or later: most package managers ship this as cmake
• OpenGL headers and libraries: OpenGL libraries and headers are specific to your graphics card. Make sure that you have hardware accelerated OpenGL drivers installed. Software renderers like Mesa will make SuperTux unplayable slow.
• SDL2 (2.0.1 or later)
• SDL2_image (2.0.0 or later)
• OpenAL: (1.0 or later)
• C++ OpenGL library (choose one of the two options below):
  • GLEW or
  • glbinding
• Boost smart_ptr and format headers, along with date_time and filesystem libraries
• cURL: for Add-on downloads
• libogg and libvorbis
• FreeType
• libraqm: optional, but needed to display Arabic

Note I: for any of the above listed libraries (OpenGL, SDL2, SDL2_image, OpenAL, GLEW/glbinding, Boost, cURL, libogg and libvorbis), you should also have development headers installed. Debian-based distributions have -devel packages containing the mentioned headers, on Arch Linux these should be included in the library package.

Note II: We tried to write our code clean, portable and platform neutral, so it should be possible to compile it on a wide range of platforms and also with other compilers than gcc or clang. We use Travis CI to test commits and pull requests in our repository, but unfortunately it's not always possible to test the code in very exotic setups. However, feel free to report issues to our bug tracker on GitHub or to supertux-devel@lists.lethargik.org.

Note III (regarding glbinding): To use glbinding instead of GLEW, call cmake with the flag -DGLBINDING_ENABLED=ON

Installing under Linux/UNIX using CMake

SuperTux uses CMake to generate a set of Makefiles for the build process. To generate these Makefiles and build SuperTux, perform the following steps:

1. cd to the directory where you unpacked the SuperTux source archive, i.e. to the directory containing src and data.

2. If you cloned this Supertux repo using git run git submodule update --init --recursive to fetch/update squirrel, tinygettext, physfs, and some other modules. (If you got this version of Supertux from a tarball (.tar), squirrel and tinygettext are already in the tarball.)

3. Create and change to a new, empty build directory by running mkdir build, cd build.

4. Run cmake .. to create the Makefiles needed to build SuperTux with standard options. If you are missing any libraries needed to build SuperTux, install those first, then try running CMake again. See below for instructions on how to change to standard options.

5. Type make to start the build process.

6. Type make install to install the programs and any data files and documentation. (You should be a root user on Linux systems. You can become a root user with the su command or by using sudo make install) Note that there is no uninstall target, so you might wish to create a package or other system-specific installation instead.

7. The game should work now and you can remove the source directory.

You can customize the build process by setting additional options for CMake. The easiest way to do this is to use run ccmake .. instead of cmake .. to bring up the curses-based user interface of CMake. Select an option using the arrow keys, change the selected option by pressing the Enter key, then hit the c (repeatedly, if necessary) to apply your changes and bring up new options resulting from your newly set ones. When you are done, press the g key to generate a new set of Makefiles and exit.

Alternatively, you can pass options to cmake .. via the command line. Some common command line switches are:

-DCMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE=ON : Generates Makefiles that print all commands prior to executing them.

-Dxxx_LIBRARY=/path/to/library.so -Dxxx_INCLUDE_DIR=/path/to/headerfiles : Manually specify the installation directory of a library.

-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=DEBUG : Enables debug mode and compiles extra debug symbols into the SuperTux executable. This is useful when sending in bug reports to the developers.

-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RELEASE : Enables release mode and compiles some sanity checks out of the build.

Notes for GIT users

SuperTux does not need to be installed on the system; you can run it from its own directory.

If ccache is installed and working, it can help to signigicantly reduce the (re)compilation time, e.g. when doing a git bisect with many checkouts. Furthermore, it is possible to reduce the optimization level to O1, which may reduce compilation times:

cmake .. -DWARNINGS=ON -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="-O1"

A general way to reduce compilation time is running make with multiple threads:

make -j $(nproc || sysctl -n hw.ncpu || echo 2)

Installing under Windows using CMake and Visual Studio

To build SuperTux on Windows with Visual Studio you need to have CMake and a recent version of Visual Studio installed. Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition is known to work fine.

Because it's difficult to build and download all the dependencies per hand on windows, SuperTux provides a dependency package that should contain all headers and libraries needed to build SuperTux on Windows.

1. Unpack the SuperTux source pack or get the source with git (git clone --recursive https://github.com/SuperTux/supertux.git).

2. Extract the dependency package into the source directory, so the dependencies folder is besides the src folder.

3. Create a new, empty build folder.

4. Open a console window and navigate to the build directory.

5. Run cmake .. to create the VS solution that builds SuperTux with standard options. For more CMake options, look at end of the Linux/UNIX build section.

6. Open the new Visual Studio solution SUPERTUX.sln in the build directory.

7. Build the project.

8. Now you can run SuperTux using the run_supertux.bat file