Build the Viewer on Windows

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Step 1. Install Requirements

Required software:

• CMake
• Git
• Visual Studio 2022 - Select "Desktop development with C++" workload
• Python 3.7+ - Be sure to "Add Python to PATH"
• Autobuild

Intermediate Check

Confirm things are installed properly so far by typing the following in a terminal:

cmake --version
python --version
git --version
autobuild --version

If everything reported sensible values and not "Command not found" errors, then you are in good shape! If the autobuild command is not found then you may need to add your python installation's Scripts directory to your system path.

Step 2. Checkout Code

Viewer

Open a terminal and checkout the viewer source code:

git clone https://github.com/secondlife/viewer.git

Build Variables

See Building the Viewer with Autobuild#Select Build Variables

Step 3. Configure

Switch to the viewer repository you just checked out and run autobuild configure:

cd viewer
autobuild configure -c RelWithDebInfoOS

The -c argument determines which build configuration to create, generally either RelWithDebInfoOS or ReleaseOS. You can omit the option if you set the AUTOBUILD_CONFIGURATION environment variable to the one you want. -A may be either 64 or 32, depending on which you intend to build. You can omit that option if you set the AUTOBUILD_ADDRSIZE environment variable accordingly.

Please be patient: the autobuild configure command silently fetches and installs required autobuild packages, and some of them are large.

Step 4. Build

When that completes, you can either build within Visual Studio or from the command line

Autobuild Options

For help on configure options, type:

autobuild configure --help

The BUILD_ID is only important for a viewer you intend to distribute. For a local test build, it doesn't matter: it only needs to be distinct. If you omit --id (as is typical), autobuild will invent a BUILD_ID for you.

For the Linden viewer build, this usage:

autobuild configure [autobuild options]... -- [other options]...

passes [other options] to CMake. This can be used to override different CMake variables, e.g.:

autobuild configure [autobuild options]... -- -DSOME_VARIABLE:BOOL=TRUE

The set of applicable CMake variables is still evolving. Please consult the CMake source files in indra/cmake, as well as the individual CMakeLists.txt files in the indra directory tree, to learn their effects.

Command Line Builds

In bash, initialize your tools environment by running:

eval $(autobuild source_environment)

That only needs to be done once per bash session.

Build by running:

autobuild build --no-configure  -c <CONFIGURATION>

the resulting viewer executable will be at:

build-vcXXX-64/newview/<CONFIGURATION>/secondlife-bin.exe

Where XXX is the value of the AUTOBUILD_VSVER environment variable. It defaults to 150 (e.g. Visual Studio 2017 = version 15.0) when the variable is not set since that has been the lowest supported version but should probably be updated to 175 when using Visual Studio 2022 (version 17.5).

Building in Visual Studio

Configure your build to run in attended mode:

autobuild configure -c <CONFIGURATION> -- -DUNATTENDED:BOOL=FALSE

• Open the generated Visual Studio solution file build-vcXXX-64/SecondLife.sln
• Select ReleaseOS or RelWithDebInfoOS from the configuration dropdown. (Debug is unmaintained. It would probably fail with perplexing errors.)
• Select your starting project, if desired
• Right-click on secondlife-bin in the Solution Explorer and select Build

When the build completes (hopefully without errors) run it by pressing Control-F5

Additional Tools

• A Visual Studio helper like WholeTomato Visual Assist for VS2022 or Workspace Whiz
• A decent merge tool such as Araxis, Beyond Compare, VSCode
• Cygwin may be required for some tooling
• NSIS (Unicode version) - (Optional) Required if creating a viewer installer for distribution
• PyInstaller is required to create local modifications of the Viewer Management Process startup shim