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This is the Descent 3 open source engine, licensed under [GPL-3.0 ](https://github.com/DescentDevelopers/Descent3?tab=GPL-3.0-1-ov-file ). It includes the '1.5' patch written by Kevin Bentley and Jeff Slutter several years ago and brought to a stable condition by the Descent community.
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In order to use this, you must provide your own game files. See the [USAGE.md ](USAGE.md ) file for details about installation.
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To build the game, follow build instructions in the [BUILD.md ](BUILD.md ) file.
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Build or runtime issues should be reported on our [GitHub tracker ](https://github.com/DescentDevelopers/Descent3/issues ).
Revamp build instructions
Before this change was made, I had tried building Descent 3 on Windows
for the first time. The instructions for building Descent 3 on Windows
were unclear, inaccurate and they messed up my installation of Windows.
(See #332 for details).
I started working on this commit in order to prevent that situation from
happening again. I ended up revamping the entire build instructions
section.
The biggest change that I made was making it so that users only need to
look at the instructions for their own platforms. Before this change,
you had to look at the “Building” heading and read the sentence that was
directly beneath it. If you don’t do what that sentence says, then the
instructions won’t work. Unfortunately, the way that the instructions
were laid out drew the reader’s eye away from that sentence.
Specifically, the instructions would draw the reader’s attention towards
the subheading for their specific platform. This commit makes it so that
each platform-specific subsection contains everything that users of that
platform need to know.
Another change that I made has to do with Git. Previously, the
instructions said “Build steps below assume you have already cloned the
repository and entered it locally.” They never told users how to make
sure that Git is installed or how to create a clone of the repository.
They also didn’t tell Windows users that the clone of Descent3 should
not be entered until after VCPKG_ROOT has been set. In other words, if a
Windows user had followed the instructions exactly as they were written,
then they would have ended up with a clone of vcpkg inside of their
clone of Descent3 (not using submodules!). This commit adds explicit
instructions for installing Git and cloning Descent3. It also makes sure
that Descent3 is only cloned after all dependencies have been installed.
I also made a Visual Studio-related changes in this commit. Previously,
the instructions for Windows said “Requires Visual Studio 2022 and C++
Tools (cmake and vcpkg)”, but the instructions never told users how to
make sure that they had those things. This commit adds explicit
instructions for how to make sure that you have Visual Studio and the
required components installed.
Another change that this commit makes has to do with vcpkg. Before this
commit, the Windows build instructions had you manually set up vcpkg.
This was redundant because the instructions also had you install Visual
Studio 2022 with the “Desktop development with C++” workload. That
workload comes with vcpkg [1], so setting up vcpkg manually was
unnecessary. This commit removes the parts about installing vcpkg.
(Thanks to @Lgt2x for this idea [2].)
The commit also adds sentences to the ends of the platform-specific
build instructions that tell users where the built files get put. This
is technically redundant since the Usage instructions already tell users
where to find the built files. Even though those sentences are
redundant, I still included them because they make the instructions
easier to use.
This commit also makes a minor capitalization-related change.
Previously, the build instructions said “Building - MacOS”. The official
capitalization has been “macOS” since 2016 [3][4].
Another minor change that this commit makes has to do with the Ubuntu
and Fedora build instructions. This commit adds the sentence “Run these
commands:” to each of those sections. I only added that sentence in
order to make the Ubuntu and Fedora sections more consistent with the
Windows and macOS sections. The Windows and macOS sections use that
sentence as part of a numbered list.
[1]: <https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/workload-component-id-vs-community?view=vs-2022#desktop-development-with-c>
[2]: <https://github.com/DescentDevelopers/Descent3/pull/413#discussion_r1624974614>
[3]: <https://www.businessinsider.com/wwdc-2016-os-x-becomes-macos-2016-6>
[4]: <https://www.apple.com/macos>
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## Contributing
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Anyone can contribute! We have an active Discord presence at [Descent Developer Network ](https://discord.gg/GNy5CUQ ). Patches should be submitted on GitHub.
