Building in Visual Studio

Finding Visual Studio project and solution files

Project and solution files for the PC (windows, x86) are included with the base source packages.
Project and solution files for other platforms are then added when platform specific source code archives are installed.

All solution files are located in the 'SDKRoot/code' directory.

Solution file naming

The solution files are all suffixed by the relevant platform code.

The solution file for building from the interface layer package on PC is named 'InterfaceLayer_PC.sln'.

The solution files for building from the full source package are named 'FullSource_PPP.sln', where PPP indicates a platform code (see Platform Specific Source Code Archives).

Visual Studio versions

All project and solution files supplied are for Visual Studio 2005.
It may be possible to get the supplied project files to load into Visual Studio 2003 by manually modifying the version number in the project file xml, but this is not guaranteed.

Building the solutions

To build, just load the relevant solution into Visual Studio, right click the SDK component you wish to build, and select 'build'.

Additional build requirements for the 3DS Max ground export plugin

Before building the 3DS Max ground export plugin ('GroundExport'), you need to map Z: to the root directory of your 3DS Max installation, by executing 'subst Z: "C:\Program Files\3dsmax8"'(with the path modified as necessary to match your actual 3DS Max installation path).
The plugin is then built directly into the 3DS Max plugins directory.

Additional build requirements for the Maya ground export plugin

Before building the Maya ground export plugin ('GroundExport_Maya'), you need to map Y: to the root directory of your Maya installation, by executing 'subst Y: "C:\Program Files\Maya"' (with the path modified as necessary to match your actual Maya installation path).
The plugin is then built directly into the Maya bin directory.

Exception handling

The project files supplied for the 'PC' platform have exception handling turned off, and the _HAS_EXCEPTIONS preprocessor define set to 0 to turn off exception handling code in the STL headers.

(See Exception Handling.)

As far as we are aware this should be ok with Visual Studio 2005 with at least service pack 1, but there may be issues with a vanilla Visual Studio 2005 install (i.e. with no service pack).
In case of any problems exception handling can be reenabled by simply setting 'Enable C++ exceptions' to 'no', and removing the pre-processor define.

(Turning off exception handling gives us some performance improvements, but with a more significant improvment in terms of executable size.)