This document is a general overview of Freedoom’s dependencies
required to build it. See README
for a description of what Freedoom
is, and BUILD-SYSTEM
for the technical details on how Freedoom
is built.
Building the Freedoom IWADs pretty much simply requires the following:
-
make: While there is some attempt to keep our Makefiles portable, testing does not really happen on anything but GNU Make (patches to fix portability are most welcome!). On non-GNU systems, it might be available in a package and binary named as gmake.
-
ImageMagick: This is required for generating some of the graphics in Freedoom, including constructing text strings for certain cases (such as the big font in level titles). Some newer versions of ImageMagick are known to produce strange results on certain operations, most notably the title screen graphic having funny colors, but nothing major should be wrong.
-
Python: Freedoom uses several Python programs in its tree to assist with building the IWADs. Both Python 2.7 and 3.x are fully supported.
-
DeuTex 5.0: Freedoom depends on features developed in this version of DeuTex and will not build on earlier versions. It is available at https://github.com/Doom-Utils/deutex in source, Windows binary, and Ubuntu binary formats. As of July 2017, this version is very recent and may not be widely available in other distribution repositories yet.
All or most of this software should already be available in your operating system’s software repository, with the likely exception of DeuTex, which is easy to build.
Significant work has been put into making this step easy. At the top
of the Freedoom source tree, you should be able to simply type make
and wait for it to eventually produce the IWAD files in the wads
sub-directory. Parallel make builds are safe too, such as with make
-j
.
If only interested in a specific IWAD, you can also run make
wads/freedm.wad
, make wads/freedoom1.wad
, make wads/freedoom2.wad
.
As mentioned in the prior section, the Makefile only recieves testing
with the GNU version of Make. If the primary version of your Make is
not GNU and it fails, try gmake
instead.
Freedoom has normally seen all of its development on Unix-like systems, nevertheless some people like to compile Freedoom on Windows. This is possible, although complicated by our choice of tooling for the project.
It may be possible to use regular Windows versions of all the required
software, but Cygwin is highly recommended to
recreate the Unix environment on this operating system anyway. It
will simplify the process of building Freedoom greatly. The
previously-mentioned DeuTex
repository will require a C compiler (such as gcc
or clang
) to be
installed in order to build.
It is important that you install the Cygwin-specific versions of all the required software. Native versions of Make, Python, ImageMagick, and DeuTex are not likely to interact well with Cygwin versions of the software.
As Cygwin provides a GNU system and interface on top of Windows, its
command line is (by default) Bash and not cmd.exe
. Instructions on
how to use GNU systems and Bash are out of scope of this document.
-
Git: Freedoom is developed using the Git version control system, the latest developments can be tracked with it.
-
AsciiDoc: The
*.adoc
files are all written in AsciiDoc markup, and it can be used to generate HTML versions of all these documents. This is used as part of themake dist
target, to generate theREADME.html
file for inclusion with official Zip files. -
Zip: The
make dist
target uses Zip to create release archives for FreeDM, Phase 1, and Phase 2. This can also provide an easy way to automate generating in-development versions for other people.