Installing Agar on Windows (8.1 and later) - LibAgar

Before you continue, make sure that your MSYS2 installation is up to date. You can download the installer from www.msys2.org.

You can install packages using the pacman -S command. We will assume that you are using MSYS64 UCRT under x86_64. If you are using a different build environment, substitute the mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64 part in the package name.

The following packages are required:

• make
• pkgconf
• mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-gcc (or other C compiler of your choice)
• mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-freetype ⁽¹⁾

The following packages are recommended:

• mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-fontconfig (for system font discovery).
• mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-mesa (for wgl and other OpenGL drivers).
• msys2-w32api-headers (for the wgl driver).
• msys2-w32api-runtime (for the wgl driver).
• mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-SDL2 (for the sdl2mw, sdl2fb and sdl2gl drivers).
• mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-libpng (for PNG image file support).

The following packages are optional:

• mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-libjpeg-turbo (for JPEG image file support).
• mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-SDL (for the SDL 1.2 sdlfb and sdlgl drivers, do not use if using SDL2).
• mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-gettext (for native-language support).
• mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-libiconv (for non-Unicode/non-ASCII character set support).
• mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-winpthreads-git (for thread-safety / multithreading).

Developers may also wish to install:

• man (agar provides extensive manual pages with code examples)
• mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-gdb (for debugging)
• patch (for applying patches)
• perl (for concurrent-building or regenerating ./configure)
• subversion (use svn co https://dev.csoft.net/agar/trunk to clone Agar sources)
• vim (syntax files are available from the syntax/ directory)
• zip, unzip (for building binary packages)

Download or clone the Agar sources, compile and install using:

  $ tar -xzf agar-1.7.0.tar.gz
  $ cd agar-1.7.0

  $ ./configure --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 \
      --prefix=/ucrt64 \
      --enable-debug \
      --enable-sg \
      --with-{freetype,sdl2,png,jpeg,gl}=/ucrt64 \
      --without-{fontconfig,gettext,iconv}
  
  $ make && make install

There are a number of build options available (see ./configure --help).

• --enable-debug is recommended for developers since it enables assertions and type safety checking for event handler arguments. It impacts performance significantly and should never be used in release builds.
• --disable-threads will improve performance in cases where thread-safety is not needed.
• Omit --with-sdl2 if the SDL2 driver is not needed. For SDL 1.x support, you can use --with-sdl instead (cannot be used along with SDL2).
• Omit --with-png and --with-jpeg if the ability to load images in PNG and JPEG format is not required.
• If native language support is needed add --enable-nls and --with-gettext=/ucrt64. If you need support for character sets other than Unicode and ASCII, use --with-iconv=/ucrt64.

Manual pages are installed by default, so you should be able to use the following in the msys2 console:

  $ man AG_Intro

If don't need an offline copy of the manual pages, you can speed up the install using --without-manpages.

Agar provides a test suite for developers, agartest.exe. It must be compiled and installed separately.

  $ cd tests
  $ ./configure --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 \
      --prefix=/ucrt64 \
      --with-agar=/ucrt64
  $ make && make install

Then execute the installed agartest.exe in the /ucrt64/bin directory.

You can also check that Agar is working with the following example (hello.c):

  #include <agar/core.h>
  #include <agar/gui.h>
  
  int
  main(int argc, char *argv)
  {
          AG_Window *win;
          
          if (AG_InitCore(NULL, 0) == -1 ||
              AG_InitGraphics(0) == -1) {
                  return (1);
          }
          win = AG_WindowNew(0);
          AG_LabelNew(win, 0, "Hello, world!");
          AG_WindowShow(win);
          AG_EventLoop();
          return (0);
  }

To compile hello.c as a standalone Windows executable, use:

  $ gcc -o hello \
      `agar-config --cflags` hello.c \
      `agar-config --libs`