BUILDING WINGS 3D ON WINDOWS
============================

This guide describes how you can build Wings 3D from the
sources on a Windows system.

$Revision: 1.12 $
$Date: 2005/04/08 06:02:27 $

Required software
=================

From Wings 0.98.16b and higher, Wings can be built on Windows
using only free/open-source software.

The following software is needed:

- The Wings source. http://www.wings3d.com

- Cygwin, a unix-like environment for Windows. http://www.cygwin.com

- Erlang/OTP R11B-2 or later. http://www.erlang.org
  (Download the pre-built binaries for Windows.)

- ESDL 0.96.0626 or later. http://esdl.sf.net
  I usually recommend downloading the pre-built binaries for Windows,
  but for the combination R11B-2 and ESDL 0.96.0626 you MUST build
  ESDL from source (or Wings will crash).

- MinGW, a C compiler and libraries for building native Windows applications.
  http://www.mingw.org

- NSIS 2.02 or higher, an installer/uinstaller maker.
  (The beta releases of NSIS 2.0 will no longer work.)
  http://nsis.sf.net.

Optional software
=================

To build the fbx plugin, you'll need the fbx library.
http://www.autodesk.com/fbx

Installing the software
=======================

In general, you should follow the instructions for each package.

Installing Cygwin
-----------------

Make sure that you install the GNU Make program. It will be needed
later in the build process.

Setting up the environment
==========================

A few environment variables need to be set. They can be set
for Windows globally from "My Computer", or only in the Cygwin shell
by adding them to ".profile".

ESDL_PATH need to be set to path of the directory you installed ESDL in.

Modify the PATH environment variable so that the following programs 
are runnable from a Cygwin (bash) shell.

   make         (Cygwin, if you installed Make)

   erlc.exe     (Erlang/OTP)

   mingw32-gcc  (MinGW)

   makensis.exe (NSIS)

An easy way to check that the programs are runnable is to use the
"which" command in a cygwin shell like this:

$ which make
/usr/bin/make
$

Unpacking the Wings source code
===============================

Give the "-j" flag to the "tar" program to tell it to decompress using
the "bunzip2" program.

Example:

$ tar jxf wings-0.98.36.tar.bz2

The build steps that follow assume that you are in the wings source
directory.

Example:

$ cd wings-0.98.36.tar.bz2

Basic build
===========

To build a minimal Wings that can be used for development purposes,
all you need is to run make from inside the directory where the
sources where unpacked.

Example:

$ pwd
/home/bjorng/wings-0.98.36
$ make
.
.
.
<A lot of output follows>
.
.
.
$ 

Running Wings
============

To run the Wings you have just build, you'll need to write a command line
similar to this:

	werl -pa $ESDL_PATH/ebin -pa <MY_WINGS_PATH>/ebin -run wings_start start_halt

where you should substitute <MY_WINGS_PATH> with the path to the Wings
source directory.

Example:

$ werl -pa $ESDL_PATH/ebin -pa c:/cygwin/home/bjorng/wings-0.98.36/ebin -run wings_start start_halt
$

An Erlang console should appear, followed by the Wings window.
It should work OK except that there will be no file dialog boxes
if you try File|Open or File|Save. (See the next section on how
to remedy that.)

Instead of writing the command line every time you want to start Wings,
you can package it in a script like this:

#!/bin/bash
exec werl -pa $ESDL_PATH/ebin -pa c:/cygwin/home/bjorng/wings-0.98.36/ebin -run wings_start start_halt ${1+"$@"}

Notes:

[1] "exec" kills the shell process running the script, saving a
    tiny amount of system memory.

[2] The "${1+"$@"}" thing passes along any arguments (or none) to Wings,
    allowing Wings to open up a wings file when it starts.

You could also package the command line into a standard windows shortcut.
(That is what I do.)

Building the file dialog plug-in
================================

To get native Windows file dialog boxes, you'll need to compile
the file dialog plug-in the "plugins_src/win32_file" directory.

$ cd plugins_src/win32_file
$ make
<Some output>
$

Building all
============

Make sure that your current directory is the directory in which the
sources where unpacked.

Example:

$ pwd
/home/bjorng/wings_releases/wings-0.98.36
$

To build all (including the installer), run the following command:

$ make win32
.
.
.
<A lot of output follows>
.
.
.
$

When everything is done, there should be a file named like

	wings-0.98.36.exe

in the current directory.