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Building Orxonox with MinGW

Posted: Mon Feb 15, 2016 9:15 pm
by x3n
To everyone who's interested in building Orxonox with MinGW:
We switched from MinGW (32) to MinGW-w64. MinGW-w64 is something like a fork of the old MinGW project that defined new headers and added support for 64bit builds (it is however still possible to make 32bit builds).
We also switched from MSYS to MSYS2 as our build environment. MSYS2 is also something like a fork of the old MSYS project and has many advantages.

I updated the guide in the wiki and added new pre-built dependency packages for MinGW-w64 (both 32 and 64bit).

MSYS2 and MinGW-w64 are clearly a step forward compared to the old tools: the 'make' command is faster and doesn't kill itself randomly anymore; gcc comes in the latest version (currently 5.3.0); it's possible to build Orxonox in 64bit mode; some libraries like DirectX and dbhelp are included by default.

Nonetheless Visual Studio/Visual C++ is still the recommended build environment for Orxonox on Windows because it compiles (and links) way faster and has a pretty debugger. But it never hurts to support different compilers on a platform. :)