cnq3/build.md

Building CNQ3

Toolchains

There are 3 supported build toolchains:

• Visual C++ on Windows x64
• GCC or Clang on Linux x64
• Clang or GCC on FreeBSD x64

Directories

Directory	Contains
makefiles	premake script and pre-generated Visual C++ and GNU makefiles
.build	intermediate build files
.bin	final executables (and symbol database files on Windows)

Building on Windows with Visual C++ 2019 or later

Requirements

• The %QUAKE3DIR% environment variable must be defined to the absolute path to copy the .exe and .pdb files to
• nasm.exe (Netwide Assembler) is in your path for building the client
• One of the following is true for building the client:
  • The %DXCPATH% environment variable contains the full path to dxc.exe
  • dxc.exe is already in your %PATH%

Options

• The %CPMADIR% environment variable must be defined to the name of the mod directory for launching through the debugger

Build steps

• Set the %QUAKE3DIR% environment variable
• Open makefiles\windows_vs2019\cnq3.sln or makefiles\windows_vs2022\cnq3.sln
• Build

Notes

• You don't need to set environment variables globally
• Instead, we recomment you set them for the Visual Studio process only

Here's an example batch script for opening the Visual Studio solution:

cd cnq3\makefiles\windows_vs2022
set QUAKE3DIR=C:\Programs\Q3\Dev
set CPMADIR=cpma_dev
set DXCPATH=C:\Programs\dxc\bin\x64\dxc.exe
start "" cnq3.sln
exit

With this set-up, you can press F5 and run the engine through the Visual C++ debugger on the right q3 install and right mod folder immediately.

Building on Linux / FreeBSD with GCC / Clang

Requirements

• On FreeBSD, we link against libexecinfo for the backtrace functions. We thus require FreeBSD 10.0 or later.

Options

• The $(QUAKE3DIR) environment variable can define the absolute path to copy the executables to

Build steps

• Navigate to the root of the repository
• Run make [config=debug|release] all|server to build on Linux
  For FreeBSD, use gmake instead of make

Notes

• To create the QUAKE3DIR variable in the build shell, you can use export QUAKE3DIR=~/games/q3
• To delete the variable from the build shell, you can use unset QUAKE3DIR
• On FreeBSD, Clang is now the default compiler
• For most Linux distros, GCC is still the default compiler
• To force building with Clang, you can use CC=clang CXX=clang++ as make/gmake arguments
• To force building with GCC, you can use CC=gcc CXX=g++ as make/gmake arguments
• You don't have to specify $(CPP), it's not used by any of the makefiles

Environment variables

There are 3 environment variables used for compiling and debugging:

Env. Var.	Meaning	Example
QUAKE3DIR	absolute directory path	C:\Programs\Q3
CPMADIR	mod folder name	cpma
DXCPATH	full dxc.exe file path	C:\Programs\dxc\bin\x64\dxc.exe

Env. Var.	Windows	Linux / FreeBSD
QUAKE3DIR	required for building	optional for building
CPMADIR	required for debugging	unused
DXCPATH	optional for building(1)	unused

1. DXCPATH is optional if you already have dxc.exe in your PATH