README.MSVC - SimGear/source - 7 February, 2005 This document describes how to build SimGear using the supplied workspace and project files for Microsoft Visual C/C++. The workspace (DSW), and project (DSP) files are in Version 6, but these will also work with Version 7, .NET, which will 'convert' them to SLN/VCPROJ files ... Unpack the SimGear source tar.gz file into your work directory. This creates a new subdirectory called SimGear-X.Y.Z. Rename this to SimGear. Or you may use cvs, or WinCVS, to download, and update the SimGear folder. Before we can build SimGear you must unpack the third party library, zlib. The source is included in the SimGear/src-libs directory. Unpack zlib-x.y.z into the local directory, src-libs. At this point your directory structure should look something like this: \SimGear\source SimGear src-libs/zlib-1.1.4/ Now open the SimGear workspace. This workspace file may contain a project for building metakit(mklib), which is no longer needed. Load SimGear and zlib. In MSVC6, Select each project as the active project and build all. Order is unimportant since there are no dependencies between the SimGear and zlib. The MSVC7 default is ALL ... The SimGear.dsp contains a custom build step, which does not always function, so if the project is missing a file simgear_config.h, then you need to rename, or copy simgear_config.h.vc5 to simgear_config.h. The workspace and project files are generated by a perl script with extra input from the am2dsp.cfg file. Since, this 'cfg' file can never 'satisfy' all 'environments', you will have to provide additional include paths for PLIB, AL, ... Also carefully check the runtime libraries chosen, and make sure you are generating SimGear and zlib WIN32 COFF libraries (archives) using your CHOSEN runtime. Whether you are using 'pthreads', or not, you can 'standardise' on Multi-threaded. That is 'Mutithreaded (/MT)' for Release configuration, and "Debug Multithreaded (/MTd)' for Debug configuration ... When completed, you should have the following new files: \SimGear\source\Debug\SimGear.lib \SimGear\source\Release\SimGear.lib \SimGear\source\src-libs\zlib-1.1.4\Debug\zlib.lib \SimGear\source\src-libs\zlib-1.1.4\Release\zlib.lib SimGear, and zlib, are now ready to be 'included' in other workspaces, like FlightGear, TerraGear, etc ... See readme.msvc6.txt for some specific 'kluges', and further comments on the MSVC7 build. EOF