Windows

Dependencies

If you decide to target C++ on Windows, you will need to have Visual Studio C++ installed. We recommend using Visual Studio C++ Express 2010, which is a free download and has support for Windows XP through current versions of Windows.

You can use "lime setup" to help automate the install:

lime setup windows

Targets

Targeting Windows, you can choose either C++ or Neko. Using C++ will be best for performance, and is recommended when making releases as well as performance testing. Neko is valuable because it compiles almost instantly, which is valuable during development, and since it is a virtual machine it can sometimes provide a stack trace where native C++ may hard crash (such as a NULL pointer exception).

Theoretically, Neko could also be used for cross-desktop builds (such as Windows from Mac) but there are some minor issues that would need to be resolved for Neko to find its library dependencies.

Architectures

Windows builds are currently 32-bit, Win32. For compatibility, we have chosen not to make special 64-bit Windows builds. There is some support in the codebase for Windows RT, but this is not officially supported.

Compatibility

All Win32 versions of Windows, from Windows XP through the current generation of Windows 8 desktop. Software, OpenGL 1 and OpenGL 2+ graphics are supported.

Components

We use SDL 2 to handle windowing, events and input on Windows, and OpenAL-Soft for audio. Other dependencies include libjpeg, libpng, Freetype and cURL.

Future

We have made strides to support Windows RT (for compatibility with Windows 8 "modern" or Windows Phone 8), but these targets require DirectX for rendering. We are watching the ANGLE project, for a possible opportunity to run OpenGL on these targets. This would also be helpful if we target Xbox.

Compiling

You can use "windows" as the target when using "lime" commands:

lime test windows

This will use C++ by default. You can target Neko using the "-neko" flag:

lime test windows -neko