Get the latest Agar Windows binary package from the download page. You can unpack the archive to a location such as C:\Program Files\Agar.

Start Visual Studio and bring up Tools / Options. Select Projects and Solutions / VC++ Directories. In the Show directories for field, select the option Include files. If you have unpacked the Agar SDK package into C:\Program Files\Agar, for example, insert the line:

  C:\Program Files\Agar\include

Now select Show directories for / Library files and insert the line:

  C:\Program Files\Agar\lib

Agar (as of version 1.3) requires the SDL library. If you have not already installed the SDL development package, go to the SDL download area, download the file SDL-devel-1.2.*-VC8.zip (or SDL-devel-1.2.*-VC6.zip if you use Visual Studio 6.0), unpack its contents into a location such as C:\Program Files\SDL and add C:\Program Files\SDL\include to your include path and C:\Program Files\SDL\lib to your library path like you just did with the Agar SDK.

You will also want to copy SDL.dll to your C:\Windows\System (or C:\Windows\System32 on Windows x64).

If you have installed one of the nothreads flavors of the Agar SDK, you can skip this section.

Thread safety and support for thread management in Agar-Core requires the POSIX threads API. POSIX threads are supported natively by all modern, decent operating systems. Under Windows, you will need to use a small library called Pthreads-win32.

Go to the Pthreads-win32 download area, get the latest version (pthreads-w32-2-x-x-release.exe) and extract to in some temporary location. Rename and move the Pre-built.2 directory over to C:\Program Files\Pthreads.

Copy the DLL files (or at least PthreadVC2.DLL) from the lib subdirectory to your C:\Windows\System (or C:\Windows\SysWOW64 with Windows x64).

Go to Tools / Options / Projects and Solutions / VC++ Directories in Visual Studio and add C:\Program Files\Pthreads\include to your include path and C:\Program Files\Pthreads\lib to your library path like you just did for Agar and SDL.

If you have installed one of the nofreetype flavors of the Agar SDK, you can skip this section. If FreeType if unavailable , Agar will revert to rendering text using a built-in, monospace bitmap font.

You can download a binary package of FreeType for Windows, which was compiled and tested using Visual Studio 2005, here: FreeType235-win32-i386.zip, and unpack it into a directory such as C:\Program Files\FreeType.

If for some reason this package doesn't work, there is also a package available from GnuWin32 (SourceForge download area), but you will have to rename lib/libfreetype.dll.a to freetype.lib (and copy bin/freetype6.dll to your C:\windows\system also or C:\windows\system32). You will probably get some linker warnings since the GnuWin32 binaries were not compiled with Visual C++.

You can now create your application. In the Application Wizard, set Application type to Console application, check the Empty project box and click Finish.

In the Solution Explorer, go to Properties from the popup menu of your project. Click on Configuration Properties / Linker / System and set the SubSystem parameter to Windows (/SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS). Click on Configuration Properties / Linker / Input, and add the following to the Additional Dependencies field:

  ag_gui.lib
  ag_core.lib
  SDL.lib
  SDLmain.lib
  opengl32.lib
  freetype.lib

If you are using a nogl flavor of the Agar SDK, you can remove opengl32.lib. If you are using a nofreetype flavor, you can remove freetype.lib.

Add a new C++ file to Source Files in the Solution Explorer, such as main.cpp. Here is a standard Hello World you can use. Your application should now compile and run properly.

Note: If you want your application to be portable to other operating systems and other development environments, consider the BSDBuild utility. It can even generate project files for you.

If you are not using the precompiled SDK and would like to compile Agar yourself, look for the project files included in the .\ProjectFiles\ directory in the Agar source. Locate the .zip file matching your Visual C++ release, for example vs2005-windows.zip will work with all Visual C++ 2005 editions. There are also some flavors such as nothreads, which disable thread safety and nofreetype which does not depend on FreeType.

Unpack the archive into the very top Agar source directory, such that Agar.sln will end up in the same directory as Agar's README file.

Open Agar.sln with Visual Studio and you should now be able to compile the toolkit. Once Agar is compiled, run INSTALL-SDK.EXE in the root of the Agar source directory to install the libraries on your system. By default, they are installed into C:\Program Files\Agar.

The set of project files included in Agar's .\ProjectFiles\ were chosen for various common combinations of IDE versions, platforms and compile-time options (such as nothreads). If you wish to use a specific combination not available in .\ProjectFiles\, it is possible to generate the project files with the following procedure:

1. If you do not have Cygwin installed, install it. Make sure Interpreters / perl is enabled.
2. Download PREMAKE.EXE from here and copy it to Cygwin's /usr/local/bin directory. Choose the last version of the 3.0 series (Premake 4 is not backward compatible and is not currently supported).
3. Download BSDBuild, install it with ./configure && make all install.
4. Find Makefile.proj in Agar's top-level source directory, open it up in a text editor.
5. Add an entry to PROJFILES, for example: windows:arm:vs2005:-nogl:--without-gl
6. Still in Agar's top-level source directory, execute touch Makefile.config, then make proj from the Cygwin shell. If successful, the new project files will appear under .\ProjectFiles\.
7. Unpack the project files in the root of the source.

If you are getting this linker error:

  SDLmain.lib(SDL_win32_main.obj): error LNK2019:
  unresolved external symbol _SDL_main referenced in function _main

Make sure your main() is declared exactly as int main(int argc, char *argv).