Install Robot Devastation - PC (Windows)

First of all, you need a C++ compiler. You can download the latest Visual Studio (Community edition) from the Microsoft website. In order to configure and build VS projects, CMake will be used (downloads page).

Download and install YARP binaries

RD software is designed around YARP. In case you installed a recent version of Visual Studio, you may just download precompiled binaries from the YARP downloads page and skip to #Download and install additional dependencies. Alternatively, you may compile ACE and YARP from sources.

Download and compile ACE from sources

YARP communications rely on ACE. Download the latest micro release of ACE from here, TAO is not required. Follow the instructions at Building and Installing ACE on Windows with Microsoft Visual Studio. Select either the Release Win32 or Release x64 configuration in VS. Remember this choice for later: both the dependencies and the game itself must be compiled in/against the same architecture (Win32/x64).

Note: we recommend to launch the ACE_wrappers solution (depending on your Visual Studio toolset, you'll choose either ACE_wrappers_vc12.sln or ACE_wrappers_vc14.sln) instead of ACE since the former will prevent you from compiling a lot of binaries you probably won't need, thus reducing the overall build time.

Download and compile YARP from sources

YARP code is hosted on GitHub. You can download the source code by clicking here, or clone the repository in your local machine with the help of your preferred Git client.

Now, configure the VS project:

Run the CMake GUI application.
Point the Where is the source code path to the folder where you have decompressed/cloned YARP.
Point the Where to build the binaries path to a /build subfolder of the previous directory.
Click on Configure and select the corresponding Visual Studio toolset you had installed at the beginning of this guide. Pick the architecture option chosen for ACE in the previous section (Win64 suffix in case of a 64-bit architecture).
Provide the path to your ACE build in the corresponding options: ACE_INCLUDE_DIR should point to the ACE_wrappers directory (unless renamed), and ACE_ACE_LIBRARY_RELEASE to ACE_wrappers/lib/ACE.lib.
Click on Generate and Open project (if your CMake GUI version provides such button) or browse to the build path and click on the Visual Studio solution (look for the .sln extension). If you want to install YARP in the default path (C:\Program Files or C:\Program Files (x86)), you'll need to start Visual Studio with administrator privileges, then click on File>Open, browse to the build folder and open the .sln file.

In Visual Studio, select the Release configuration and compile the solution. To install YARP (not obligatory), compile the INSTALL project from the project explorer.

Download and install additional dependencies

RD depends on the following libraries:

Unzip/install these libraries in the locations of your choice, you'll need these paths later on.

Compile Robot Devastation

Run CMake GUI and follow points 1 to 3 from #Download and compile YARP from sources to prepare your RD build in the desired path. Upon pressing Configure, CMake will warn you about missing configuration variables pertaining to previously listed project dependencies that you'll need to provide manually so you can proceed further by clicking Configure again. This process should be repeated until no more errors are thrown. Open the Visual Studio solution, select the Release configuration and compile.

Set runtime path

Locations of dependent dynamic libraries (files with the .dll extension) should be appended to the PATH environment variable in order to link them at run time when YARP and the RD programs (as .exe files) are launched. This configuration can be set on Computer>System properties>Advanced system settings>Advanced>Environment Variables. Alternatively, you may just copy all DLLs and paste them in the same directories the executables are located in.

Configure YARP data directories

YARP needs to locate RD resources and configuration files. To achieve that, add the YARP_DATA_DIRS environment variable (see previous section) and set its value to the absolute path that leads to /share/rd in your build or installation directory of Robot Devastation.

Known issues and remarks

ZBar is shipped with an outdated zlib1.dll library, a more recent one can be found in the bundles SDL2 comes with. Remember to omit this file when copying all DLLs to the directory where the executables are placed in, or move its location path after SDL2 in the PATH environment variable, depending on your preference as explained in the previous section.

If unzipping all SDL2 stuff to the same location (i.e. all headers go to a common include directory, DLLs to lib and so on), make sure that you always keep the most recent version when prompted to choose between files with the same name. This is motivated by another clash between different versions of zlib1.dll used by SDL2 projects (image and ttf).

In addition, official ZBar binaries are compiled for 32-bit architectures only. In order to achieve a 64-bit build, you need to download the corresponding installer from our GitHub mirror (available for both 32-bit and 64-bit archs).

PC (Windows)