README.WINDOWS

README for Windows (32- and 64-bit) platforms
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**Compilers**
BZFlag uses Microsoft Visual C++ for its prebuilt binary releases and project
files are provided for it. The current compiler used is Visual C++ 2017 (VC15).
You can download Visual Studio Community 2017 for free from here:
https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/

**Targets**
There are a total of 4 build targets in the VC projects. There are targets
for Release and Debug, and each has a 32-bit and 64-bit version. At this time,
only 32-bit is supported. Our dependencies don't build correctly on 64-bit with
our current script. Also, there's no real performance advantage in having a
64-bit BZFlag client as the game doesn't use much RAM.

**Required Libraries**

Various third-party libraries are needed, which are packaged in our
bzflag-dependencies repository. Either grab a pre-built binary package from
the releases section, or build the dependencies from source as described at
the repository. The BZFlag build expects that an environment variable called
BZ_DEPS exist and point to dependencies repository directory (the one that
would contain the one or more output directories and src directory containing
the third-party libraries)
  https://github.com/BZFlag-Dev/bzflag-dependencies

NSIS 3.03 is needed to build an installer, which is built as part of a release
build.
  http://nsis.sourceforge.net/

**Running and Debugging**
By default the compiler will copy the compiled executables to the root level
of the source drive ( the same place that the data dir is at). From there
you can simply double click the application to run it. If you wish to debug
the program, you must set the debug executable path and working directory
inside VC to use this executable and path.

**Installer**
If you wish to build the full release package using the fullbuild solution,
you will need to have NSIS installed. The built installer will be placed in
the bin_Release folder for the target in the root of the source tree.