Help installing MinGW Plz

[Negator_UK]

I've reasonable C/C++ coding skills, but its all based around visual studio with just a smattering of Gnu under Cygwin. So far I have I have sucessfully installed TotoiseSVN and checked out a copy of the Ufoai source

I'm trying to get to the state of being able to compile the game so I can volunteer for some coding, but have no experience of MinGW.
 
I have tried to follow the basic downloading link on the MinGW website but it just crashes Explorer - same for the "old" MinGW website (it seems to be undergoing mainenance atm).

There is a working link to a mirror : ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/gnu/mingw/

Plz could someone advise which packages I need to download from this mirror to get an install of MingW that will compile Ufoai - I don't need MinGW for any other project so I can dedicate the compiler to this game if that makes the question easier to answer.

Cheers.

[BTAxis]

Have a look here:
http://ufoai.ninex.info/wiki/index.php/Code::Blocks
The prepackaged C::B version that's linked from that page comes with MinGW, including all packages you need.

[Negator_UK]

OK, after following the instructions on the link I get the following errors when compiling in Codeblocks

"game - windows" uses an invalid compiler. Skipping...
"ufo2map - windows" uses an invalid compiler. Skipping...
"ufo_ded - windows" uses an invalid compiler. Skipping...
"ufo - windows" uses an invalid compiler. Skipping...
Nothing to be done.

I noted that Codeblocks autodetected Visual Studio 2005 and Cygwin GCC on my system when I started it up. I did not have an actual GCC for windows proper installed and I suspect that is what is missing - can you confirm that your Codeblock pre-package does not include a compiler ?? or is MinGW a compiler in its own right

Note that I interpreted the wiki instruction "copy the dynamic libraries from ../../contrib/ to a directory in your path" by adding the full path to the "contrib" directory in the SVN copy to my systems "path" environment variable, although I suspect that even if I screwed up with this it is not the cause of my build errors.

[Mattn]

you didn't set the tools dir for mingw (gcc) it's included in the installer - should also be noted on that wiki page BTAxis posted

[Negator_UK]

you didn't set the tools dir for mingw (gcc) it's included in the installer - should also be noted on that wiki page BTAxis posted

Did you mean this step is already on the Wiki page (I can't find it except for the Toolchain Executables thing) or that it isn't (in which case how do I do it ??)

I did make a typo first time round, but honestly (sic) I've followed the wiki instructions precisely now.

Cheers.

[Mattn]

which dir did you chose for your toolchain-dir?

the codeblocks zip file brings you a mingw installation that is ready to use for ufo - maybe the default compiler is not set to (mingw-)gcc?

Go to settings->Compiler and debugger
Set "Selected compiler" to "GNU GCC Compiler"
Now set the Toolchain executables to the mingw directory.

[Mattn]

Maybe also select the "Set as default" button in the "Compiler and debugger settings" after you selected GCC in the list of compilers

[Negator_UK]

Success !! It compiles, the po stuff too.

There is a spelling error on the Wiki, I didn't notice before.

In the instruction :

<< select Toolchain executables tab
<< change the compilers installation directory to c:\development\mingw

The word "development" should be "developement".
                                                                ^

O the perils of multinational projects ;-)

Thanks for the help

I'll browse the code and the ToDo lists and see what's there. I'm off on holiday tomorrow for a few days but will be back this weekend. Sometime after that presumably I'll be asking what needs focusing on.

Cheers.