Building OutpostHD from Source

I've tried to make the process of building OutpostHD from source as painless as possible but there are a few things you'll need to do to get it to work right.

First and foremost, OutpostHD is built mostly on Windows using Visual Studio 2019. The Community Edition is free and has all the tools needed to build and debug OutpostHD.

During installation, be sure to select the C++, Git and GitHub Extension in the Individual Components tab. You'll need all of these.

Git is the source code version control tool that's very popular in both open source and enterprise development. OutpostHD is hosted on GitHub.com and you'll need to ensure that git is installed with Visual Studio. By using the GitHub Extension, you can clone the OutpostHD repository from within Visual Studio without having to use 3rd party tools like TortoiseGit.

For more information on what Git is, see the Wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git

See Setting up vcpkg for complete install instructions.

All of the dependencies for OutpostHD are available via vcpkg, a very powerful command line package management system. It is not installed with Visual Studio so you'll need to get it set up manually.

After you have Visual Studio, Git and vcpkg installed, we're now ready to clone the OutpostHD repository and build.

To do this, click on the Clone Repository button.

Next, copy the GitHub URL for the OutpostHD repository, https://github.com/OutpostUniverse/OPHD.git, into the Repository location and set a location somewhere on your machine that you can easily access. Here I used C:\Repos\OPHD but you can put it anywhere. Finally, click Clone. After a few moments you'll see the OutpostHD project directory:

The Visual Studio solution file will be in the root directory and the source code will be in a folder labeled 'OPHD'.

NAS2D now comes packaged with OutpostHD as a Git Submodule and is included in the OPHD solution. When you build OutpostHD, NAS2D will be built first. It will only be rebuilt if changes are made to NAS2D or if you clean/rebuild the solution.

The data assets are now set up as a submodule of OPHD much like NAS2D.