Windows

This page contains specific information necessary to compile OpenSpace on Windows. This page has the general instructions as a required reading.

Development Tools

Visual Studio 2022 is the standard Interactive Development Environment (IDE) for Windows. The “community” version is a free download for open-source projects. When you install it, be sure to select “Custom” configuration and select the C++ compiler – it might not be included by default. You can also select a git client here (“Git GUI”). Installation could take a while (like an hour or so, depending on the machine). We are following the development of the C++ language quite closely, so there are more and more features that are no longer supported in Visual Studio 2019 or earlier versions.

Dependencies

Qt

Make sure to install the Qt version that is called MSVC 2019 64-bit. After installing you should add the bin folder from the installation to your PATH environment variable, and it is highly recommended to have only one Qt bin folder in this variable (e.g. no different versions). It is possible to copy specific Qt .dll files from the Qt bin folder to the OpenSpace bin folder, but this is discouraged. Having both the Qt bin folder set in path and the dll files copied to OpenSpace bin might cause the program to crash.

Notes

Git

You might find it easier to use SSH instead of HTTPS, especially if you’re using Two-Factor Authentication with GitHub.

If you use the command line interface for git, remember that OpenSpace has many submodules. You’ll need to use git clone --recursive and/or use the git submodule commands. The submodule commands will need to be run in both the main repository and ext/ghoul.

Visual Studio

The Release mode currently does not run correctly due to an issue with dependent libraries. Instead, use the RelWithDebInfo which has almost identical performance as the Release mode, but also provides information to debug potential crashes.

Deploying

If you want to build OpenSpace to deploy to a third party that does not have a development environment, you can use the deploy.bat file found in the support folder. When starting this batch file, it will automatically build a fresh version of OpenSpace that includes the sync and user folder. The result of the deployment is a .zip file that can be shared with other computers that are then able to extract the file and run the application directly.

FAQ

If Windows is complaining that it cannot find the VCOMP120.dll, download the Visual Studio Redistributable. On Windows 10 and up, this is not installed by default anymore. In general, this shouldn’t be an issue if you have Visual Studio installed correctly, but it will be necessary to install on other computers that do not have the IDE installed.