Building with CMake

Linux and macOS

fheroes2 can be built with CMake buildsystem. First, you need to install dependencies. For Linux and macOS follow to instructions as described above.

Next, you can configure the project with following commands:

cmake -B build

After configuration let’s build the project:

cmake --build build

After building, executable can be found in build directory.

Windows / Visual Studio

For Windows you’ll need Visual Studio 2019 with C++ support and vcpkg package manager for dependency management. Here quick and short instruction for deployment:

# Clone vcpkg repository. For convenient, let's place it in C:\vcpkg directory, but it can be anywhere.
git clone https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg.git
# Now initialize manager
.\vcpkg\bootstrap-vcpkg.bat

Your vcpkg is ready to install external libraries. Assuming that you use x64 system, let’s install all needed dependencies:

.\vcpkg\vcpkg --triplet x64-windows install sdl2 sdl2-image sdl2-mixer zlib

If you planning to develop fheroes2 with Visual Studio, you may want to integrate vcpkg with it (requires elevated admin privileges). After following command Visual Studio automagically will find all required dependencies:

.\vcpkg\vcpkg integrate install

Now you are ready to configure the project. cd to fheroes2 directory and run cmake command (note for -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE and -DVCPKG_TARGET_TRIPLET options):

cmake -B build -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE="C:\vcpkg\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmake" -DVCPKG_TARGET_TRIPLET=x64-windows

After configuration let’s build the project:

cmake --build build --config Release

After building, executable can be found in build\Release directory.

Using Demo data

CMake project allows to download and install original HoMM II Demo files which used by fheroes2 project. To do this please add -DGET_HOMM2_DEMO=ON to configuration options. For example:

cmake -B build -DGET_HOMM2_DEMO=ON <some other options>