colobot/INSTALL-MXE.md

Cross-compiling with MXE

MXE works for any BSD-compatible system (including Linux). It is a complete package with cross-compiler to Win32 (a MinGW variant) and includes scripts to automatically download and build many 3rd party libraries and tools.

To cross-compile Colobot using MXE:

1. See the MXE website (http://mxe.cc) for list of required packages and make sure you have them installed.

2. Download MXE and unpack it in the directory, where you want to keep it permanently. During the build, MXE will write that path to many files, so moving that directory can be tricky.

3. cd to the MXE root directory. It already contains a universal Makefile for everything. Usage is simply make name_of_package. It will automatically check for dependencies, etc. The packages will be installed in the MXE directory under usr/i686-w64-mingw32.static.

   You need to make gcc first for basic compiler and then do the same for some additional libraries. In the end, you should have the following packages installed (this is the final listing of usr/i686-w64-mingw32.static/installed/):

   • binutils
   • boost
   • bzip2
   • cairo
   • dbus
   • expat
   • flac
   • fontconfig
   • freetype
   • freetype-bootstrap
   • gcc
   • gcc-gmp
   • gcc-isl
   • gcc-mpc
   • gcc-mpfr
   • gettext
   • glew
   • glib
   • harfbuzz
   • icu4c
   • jpeg
   • libffi
   • libiconv
   • libpng
   • libsndfile
   • libwebp
   • lzo
   • mingw-w64
   • mxe-conf
   • ogg
   • openal
   • pcre
   • physfs
   • pixman
   • pkgconf
   • portaudio
   • sdl2
   • sdl2_image
   • sdl2_ttf
   • tiff
   • vorbis
   • xz
   • zlib

4. Now cd to directory with colobot sources. It is recommended that you create a separate directory for out-of-source build: mkdir build-mxe && cd build-mxe

   In order to cross-compile a CMake project, you have to specify a CMake toolchain file. MXE has such file in MXE's directory: usr/i686-w64-mingw32.static/share/cmake/mxe-conf.cmake So you should use the following cmake command: cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=/path/to/mxe-conf.cmake .. CMake files in Colobot should detect that MXE is being used and they will modify flags, paths, etc. as required. You should not run into any problems.

5. make should now compile the game with the resulting executable as colobot.exe. The exe is linked against all libraries statically, so there are no dependencies on external DLLs. However, the resulting binary will be huge with all these libraries, so you might want to do: strip colobot.exe.

6. If you want to create a Colobot installer, you need to additionally build nsis in MXE. Then you can create the NSIS installer that way: PATH=/path/to/mxe/binaries:$PATH make package where /path/to/mxe/binaries is path to cross-compiled MXE binaries available in MXE's directory under usr/i686-w64-mingw32.static/bin. This will create a versioned colobot-$version.exe installer that will install Colobot in system directories, add a shortcut in the start menu and setup an uninstaller.