CoolVLViewer/doc/WindowsBuildHowto.txt

1.- Build dependencies:

You need a Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition C++ build environment, Python
and CMake.

When installing Visual Studio, only install the desktop application C++
development tools (VC++ 2022, ATL Visual C++, VC++ 2022 latest v143 tools,
Visual C++ tools for CMake, JIT debugger), with the latest Windows 10 SDK (the
one selected by default in the installer); you do not need to install any other
SDK, even for running the viewer under Windows 7, 8 or 11 since the build
target API version (Win 7) is specified in the viewer cmake files via the
appropriate defines. Do not install any bundled Python either. If you wish to
build with clang, also select the clang tools.

Get Python from Python's site (https://www.python.org/).
Run the installer as administrator (right click, "Run as administrator"); this
way, you will be able to install Python in C:\Programs, for example (instead
of in your roaming profile).
You may use the custom installation option to remove the unnecessary components
that would otherwise clutter your hard disk/SSD for nothing: just keep Python
itself and the Python launcher (1).
Do make sure to ask the installer to update your PATH environment variable.

For CMake, you may use the latest release (the Cool VL Viewer build system is
regularly updated to work with the latest cmake version); v3.16+ recommended
for a faster compilation. Get it from from CMake's site:
https://cmake.org/files/LatestRelease/ (you may use the 64 bits version).
Do ask to the installer to update your PATH environment variable so that cmake
can be found.

You may have to restart your session after installation so that the new PATH is
taken into account.

To verify that everything is installed properly, you may open a command prompt
console and type the following commands:
python --version
cmake --version


2.- Building instructions:

Untar (2) the Cool VL Viewer sources and place the resulting "linden" folder
inside the Visual Studio "source" directory.
You may want to open the linden/indra/cmake/00-BuildOptions.cmake file to
review the various build options; they are set to their default used for the
official builds, but you may want to add or remove features.

Then you can choose between two methods:

a.- Automated, batch-file based building:

Point a file explorer into the linden/ directory of the sources tree and
double-click on "windows-build.bat", so to launch the build. The script will
pause at the end of the configuring step: simply press a key to continue with
the building itself.

b.- GUI build:

Proceed like above, but at the pause occurring after the configuration step,
press CTRL C to interrupt the script, and confirm its termination at the next
prompt.

After the command console has closed, point the explorer inside the
linden/build-vs* directory that just got created and double-click on the
"CoolVLViewer.sln" file so to load it into Visual Studio.

Then simply press CTRL SHIFT B to launch the viewer building process.


Note: since all the development and debugging process of the Cool VL Viewer is
done under Linux, only the "Release" build target is supported and available
under Windows. You may nonetheless decently debug the viewer under Windows by
simply copying the CoolVLViewer.pdb file produced during the building process
into the viewer-win64-release directory and launch/debug the viewer from there.


3.- Packaging and distribution:

Once the build has completed successfully, you get a ready to launch viewer in:
linden/viewer-win64-release/

If you wish to distribute your build, you will need to use InstallJammer v1.3
(https://sourceforge.net/projects/installjammer/files/InstallJammer/snapshots/installjammer-1.3-snapshot.zip/download)
with the provided script in linden/scripts/installers/windows64/ (in the latter
script, using WordPad or an editor able to deal with UNIX files, change the
occurrences of "C:/Users/root/source/cvxxxx/" with the path of whatever folder
you copied the source files into).
Simply load the CoolVLViewer-x86_64-1.32.x.mpi file into InstallJammer, select
"Build Installers" in the tree on the left, then check "Build for final release"
on the bottom and press the "Build Install" button. The distributable package
will be created in linden/scripts/installers/windows/output/


Notes:
(1) You may also install "pip" if you want to use Python for other purposes
    than just building the Cool VL Viewer (which does not need it), including
    LL's viewer or other TPVs (which do need pip to install LL's build system).

(2) 7-Zip (http://www.7-zip.org/) may be used to extract the viewer sources
    from the tar archive.