Compiling/Windows

For compiling on Windows, Visual Studio is the preferred method, although using Cygwin is also possible.

Using Visual Studio

MS Visual Studio 2012: Compile configuration (red) and solution (blue) with it's child projects.

Hercules ships with solution and project files for Visual Studio from 2012 onwards.

• Download the latest version of Visual Studio (at the time of writing, MS Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition) and install it, if you do not have Visual Studio already installed.
• Open Hercules-14.sln in your Hercules folder if you use Visual Studio 2015, for Visual Studio 2013, you need to open Hercules-12.sln, for Visual Studio 2012, you need to open Hercules-11.sln instead.
• Select the desired compile configuration (marked red). Use Release when you compile the server, where players will be playing on. Debug compiles the server without optimizations and with debugging information.
• Right-click the solution node (marked blue) and select Build solution. If you have compiled the server before, it is recommended to use Rebuild solution, as it forces the compiling of all components, not just those, which seem to have changed since last compile.
• If the compilation was successful, the resulting executables are in the same folder as the solution named login-server.exe, char-server.exe, map-server.exe and mapcache.exe.

Using Cygwin

Cygwin is a POSIX compatibility layer for Windows. As such it enables compiling the way it would be done on Linux. Compiling in Cygwin is not recommended due to lower performance and increased installation complexity.

• Download Cygwin and install it, if not already done so. When installing, select following packages:
  • from Devel: cmake, gcc and make
  • from Lib: libidn-devel, libpcre-devel, readline, zlib-devel
• Running Cygwin Terminal will create folder home/user inside Cygwin installation folder, where user is the name currently logged on Windows user.
• SQL server needs to be installed in Cygwin so the compiler can access the SQL libraries. Download the .tar.gz archive from the MySQL website, such as mysql-5.5.20.tar.gz.
• Place the archive into /home/user and execute following inside Cygwin Terminal to unpack it:

 cd ~
 tar xvzf mysql-5.5.20.tar.gz

• Navigate to directory with unpacked archive:

 cd mysql-5.5.20

• To avoid conficts, replace dtoa() with _dtoa() in strings/dtoa.c file:

 sed -i 's/dtoa(/_dtoa(/g' ./strings/dtoa.c

• Build MySQL with following commands:

 cmake .
 make mysqlclient libmysql
 make install

• After everything completes, Cygwin is ready for compiling Hercules. Navigate to the Hercules folder in Cygwin. Windows drives are accesible as /cygdrive/x where x is the letter assigned to the drive by Windows.
• Execute following commands inside Hercules folder to compile it:

 ./configure --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config
 make sql

• If the compilation was successful, the resulting executables are in the Hercules folder named login-server_sql.exe, char-server_sql.exe and map-server_sql.exe.
• Server executables can be run inside Cygwin Terminal or directly, but in this case you need to copy required libraries to Hercules folder:
  • cygwin1.dll, cygz.dll, cyggcc_s-1.dll, cygpcre-0.dll from /bin
  • cygmysqlclient-18.dll from /usr/local/mysql/lib