Cross-compiling MTASA on Linux using msvc-wine

Client-side

Server-side

Shared

This guide will walk you through how you can cross-compile MTASA on Linux targeting Windows, using msvc-wine. For running the game on Linux, see Client on Linux Manual.

Setting up the environment

Setting up msvc-wine

Clone https://github.com/mstorsjo/msvc-wine/

git clone https://github.com/mstorsjo/msvc-wine/
cd msvc-wine

Run ./vsdownload.py and ./install.sh to download and install the default packages plus MFC. You can specify the destination directory with the --dest option. --accept-license will skip the license agreement prompt; remove it if you wish to read through Microsoft’s license.

./vsdownload.py --dest /path/to/msvc-wine-install-dir/ --accept-license
./vsdownload.py --dest /path/to/msvc-wine-install-dir/ --accept-license Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.ATLMFC
./install.sh /path/to/msvc-wine-install-dir/

Caution

Skipping installing Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.ATLMFC will lead to a missing afxres.h include error when building.

Setting up the Wine preifx

Note

This guide was written with wine-10.12 in mind, using the new WoW64 mode. Your mileage may vary if you are using an older version.

Create or use an already existing wine prefix. The rest of this guide assumes that you have your WINEPREFIX environment variable set correctly.

# Set the wine prefix
export WINEPREFIX="/path/to/wine-prefix"
# If this is a new prefix, initialize it
wineboot -i

Make sure you have (the correct version of) .NET SDK installed. If you have the wine-mono package installed on your system (distributions may have it available in their repository), newly created wine prefixes will default to using that as a .NET implementation. As a result, however, the native MSBuild.exe might crash because it relies on some telemetry features that wine-mono doesn’t implement. If that’s the case, run wine uninstaller and remove Wine Mono Windows Support, then run winetricks dotnet48 to install the official .NET 4.8 package inside your wine prefix.

Installing the Microsoft DirectX SDK

You will need to download and install the Microsoft DirectX SDK (August 2009) inside your wine prefix. For more information, you may check out the original Compiling MTASA guide. To obtain the installer (DXSDK_Aug09.exe), you can use the following mirrors:

See DXSDK Aug09 Hashes for file hashes of the installer.

Caution

Skipping this step will lead to a missing d3dx9.h include error when building.

Note

Unlike on Windows, here you don’t have to restart anything. The next invocation of wine will already have the DXSDK_DIR environment variable set.

Building

To obtain the latest MTA source code, please refer to the original Compiling MTASA guide. Make sure you have your WINEPREFIX set correctly.

Doing a full build

Specify the location of the msbuild wrapper script installed by msvc-wine, then execute ./wine-build.sh. After the build completes, run wine ./win-install-data.bat to install the necessary binary blobs (and optionally the resources). You can find the msbuild wrapper script at bin/x64/msbuild in the directory where you installed msvc-wine to.

MSBUILDPATH="/path/to/msvc-wine-install-dir/bin/x64/msbuild" ./wine-build.sh
wine ./win-install-data.bat

If all went well, you should now have the built Client and Server binaries sitting inside ./Bin/. For running the Client, see Client on Linux Manual.

Note

You can also pass the build configuration (Release or Debug) and the target platform (Win32, x64, ARM or ARM64) as arguments to ./wine-build.sh.

Doing an incremental build

Although you could, you don’t need to rerun ./wine-build.sh after every change you make in the source code. If you add, remove or move a file or a directory, you can just manually regenerate the necessary projects:

wine utils/premake5.exe vs2022

Then to do an incremental build, you can just manually invoke msbuild:

/path/to/msvc-wine-install-dir/bin/x64/msbuild Build/MTASA.sln \
    -property:Configuration=Release \
    -property:Platform=Win32 \
    -maxCpuCount

IDE integration

premake can’t generate compile_commands.json by itself, but there are modules for it:

However, these might not work out of the box.

TODO

Troubleshooting

You may also want to check out the error troubleshooting section in the original Compiling MTASA guide.

Internal Compiler Errors

If you encounter ICEs (Internal Compiler Errors) when trying to build the project, you should try to increase the file descriptor limit after killing the wine server. You may also want to remove the ./Build/{bin,obj} directories.

# Kill the wine server
wineserver -k
# Increase the file descriptor limit
ulimit -n $(ulimit -Hn)
# Remove the partially built artifacts
rm -rf ./Build/{bin,obj}