Building Bitfighter

This page is dedicated to getting Bitfighter to build on your system of choice. Some useful links:

• Changelog
• Browse source

Also, please see the README.txt included in the source.

Source Code

Bitfighter uses Mercurial (hg) to manage the source code. Here is some useful Mercurial information:

• Contribute_using_Mercurial

The Bitfighter code can be found here:

• Source Checkout

If you have Mercurial installed, you can easily check out a copy of the source code by running this command in a terminal in a folder of your chosing:

hg clone https://code.google.com/p/bitfighter/

After checking out the code, if you don't want to compile the current development version, you can update to a specific released version. To see a list of released versions, type in:

hg tags

We recommend to always chose the latest release as the build instructions for older releases will be different that what is shown here on this wiki page. Update to a release that you want:

hg up bitfighter-018a

Windows

018a and earlier

Bitfighter is built with MS Visual C++ 2010 Express Edition for versions 018a and earlier. See the solution file at the root of the code tree.

019 (development) and later

We will be migrating to [CMake http://www.cmake.org/] for Windows builds in version 019 and later (and currently in the most recent development code). To build:

1. Install CMake from http://www.cmake.org/
2. In a terminal, change to the 'build' directory in the bitfighter source code tree.
3. Run one of these commands to build in the environment of your choice. (See a list of CMake 'generators' [here http://www.cmake.org/cmake/help/v2.8.10/cmake.html#section_Generators]):
   • cmake -G "Visual Studio 10" ..
   • cmake -G "MSYS Makefiles" ..
4. Open the resulting Visual Studio solution file OR run MinGW 'make', depending on what environment you chose to build

Note that we recommend using Visual Studio 2010 for the building environment on Windows.

Linux

Bitfighter should build on any major flavor of Linux. It has been tested and is known to work on Ubuntu, LinuxMint, Centos, Fedora, Debian, Mandriva and openSUSE. If you can not get it to work, you can try running it in wine: [1]

Bitfighter has several common, open source dependencies:

• SDL
• zlib
• libpng
• openal
• libvorbis
• libspeex
• libmodplug

You must install these and their development headers using your distribution's preferred method. The development headers for these libraries have similar names with a suffix, for example:

• libvorbis-dev or vorbis-devel

For Ubuntu/Debian, you will need to use apt-get:

# sudo apt-get install sdl zlib libpng openal libvorbis libspeex libmodplug libvorbis-dev vorbis-devel

For Centos/RedHat, use yum:

# sudo yum install sdl zlib libpng openal libvorbis libspeex libmodplug libvorbis-dev vorbis-devel

You will also need the following to compile:

• cmake
• make
• gcc / g++

For Ubuntu/Debian:

# sudo apt-get install cmake make gcc g++

For Centos/RedHat:

# sudo yum install cmake make gcc g++

Once your dependencies are installed, you can build bitfighter with these steps:

1. cd build
2. cmake ..
3. make

If you want to build a dedicated server (with no GUI), replace the 'make' step above with:

1. make dedicated

Next, you'll need to copy the resources to where the executable was built:

1. cd ../exe
2. cp -r ../resource/* .

And if you wish to run in standalone mode, create a standalone.txt file in the 'exe' folder to trigger this mode:

1. touch standalone.txt

Centos Dedicated Instructions

Building a dedicated server on a typical clean Centos 5 or 6 virtual server instance

# We recommend that you install and run a dedicated bitfighter server with a special user account 
# used only for this purpose, that does not have root access.
 
# These instructions are unusually long and complex due to the fact we were transitioning to a new
# build system when 018a was released.  019 will be easier!
 
# Here we create a bitfighter user; you can skip this step if you want to use an existing account
useradd bitfighter       # Create the account
passwd bitfighter        # Set the password.  Pick a good one!
 
# Do the following as a user that has sudo privileges
 
sudo yum update    # system should be up to date
 
# The following sets up the EPEL repository for extra packages (needed for mercurial)
# Choose one based on your server architecture
# 32 bit:
sudo rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
# 64 bit:
sudo rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
 
sudo yum install mercurial gcc gcc-c++ zip ncurses-devel readline-devel patch cmake screen
 
 
# Do the following as the bitfighter user
su bitfighter
cd ~
 
# Get the source code -- this will create a folder called bitfighter in your current location
# This may take a couple of minutes
hg clone https://code.google.com/p/bitfighter/
 
# Update to the tag/revision you want
cd bitfighter
hg up bitfighter-018a
 
# Apply some special patches to the build system for 018a
wget -O patch1.diff http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=GKn4qbuC
wget -O patch2.diff http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=wUzsxVp2
patch -p1 < patch1.diff
patch -p1 < patch2.diff
 
# Delete a file added by the patches above that isn't acutally needed
rm cmake/Modules/FindZLIB.cmake
 
# Build the dedicated server (called bitfighterd)
cd build
cmake ..          # This creates a Makefile for the next step
make dedicated 
 
# Copy required files into exe folder (found at the root of the code tree):
cd ../exe
cp -r ../resource/* .
touch standalone.txt     # Tell bitfighterd to run in portable mode

OS X

Bitfighter builds on OS X using Xcode 3 (3.1 or greater) but *not* Xcode 4 (yet). You must have developer tools installed to build bitfighter on OS X! (You can get them from Apple.)

Note: If you don't wish to download Xcode with iOS integration (saves about 2GB off of downloading) you can get older versions on the developer downloads page. Xcode 3.2.2 is the latest without iOS built in.

To build in Xcode:

1. Navigate through bitfighter > build > osx > Xcode > Bitfighter.xcodeproj
2. Open Bitfighter.xcodeproj with Xcode.
3. Click 'Build and Go' at the top. Bitfighter should compile successfully and attempt to launch.
   • Note: building from trunk may NOT complete successfully and/or the launch may fail.
4. Your new build will be found at Bitfighter > build > osx > build > Debug / release > *

Notes

1. The bitfighter project also builds the tnl and libtomcrypt frameworks automatically before compiling the bitfighter source itself.
2. The following frameworks are added automatically to the bundle:
   • libtomcrypt.framework
   • tnl.framework
   • Openal-Soft.framework
3. Settings are found in $HOME/Library/Application Support/Bitfighter