Compiling for X11 (Linux, *BSD)

Requirements

For compiling under Linux or other Unix variants, the following is required:

  • GCC < 6 or Clang (warning: see note below regarding GCC 6).
  • Python 2.7+ (3.0 is untested as of now)
  • SCons build system
  • pkg-config (used to detect the dependencies below)
  • X11, Xcursor, Xinerama and XRandR development libraries
  • MesaGL development libraries
  • ALSA development libraries
  • PulseAudio development libraries (for sound support)
  • Freetype (for the editor)
  • OpenSSL (for HTTPS and TLS)
  • libudev-dev (optional, build with udev=yes)

Known issues with GCC 6

There are known optimisation issues when using GCC 6 (both to compile for X11 and to cross-compile for Windows with MinGW). Until those issues are fixed in Godot’s source, or the compiler is made more forgiving again, it is advised not to use GCC 6 to compile Godot as release builds will trigger crashes.

If your distribution provides GCC 6 by default (e.g. Arch or Ubuntu 16.10), you may have to install an older version or Clang (both should be provided in the repositories). You can then force the use of another compiler version via the CC and CXX scons arguments (e.g. scons p=x11 CC=gcc-5 CXX=g++-5 if your distribution provides those binaries in its PATH). You can also use llvm=yes instead to force the usage of Clang over GCC.

Distro-specific oneliners

Arch 
pacman -S scons libxcursor libxinerama libxrandr mesa glu alsa-lib pulseaudio freetype2
Fedora 
sudo dnf install scons pkgconfig libX11-devel libXcursor-devel libXrandr-devel libXinerama-devel \
    mesa-libGL-devel alsa-lib-devel pulseaudio-libs-devel freetype-devel openssl-devel libudev-devel \
    mesa-libGLU-devel
FreeBSD 
sudo pkg install scons pkg-config xorg-libraries libXcursor libXrandr xineramaproto libglapi libGLU \
    freetype2 openssl
Gentoo 
emerge -an dev-util/scons x11-libs/libX11 x11-libs/libXcursor x11-libs/libXinerama media-libs/mesa \
    media-libs/glu media-libs/alsa-lib media-sound/pulseaudio media-libs/freetype
Mageia 
urpmi scons pkgconfig "pkgconfig(alsa)" "pkgconfig(freetype2)" "pkgconfig(glu)" "pkgconfig(libpulse)" \
    "pkgconfig(openssl)" "pkgconfig(udev)" "pkgconfig(x11)" "pkgconfig(xcursor)" "pkgconfig(xinerama)"\
    "pkgconfig(xrandr)" "pkgconfig(zlib)"
OpenBSD 
pkg_add python scons png llvm
openSUSE 
sudo zypper install scons pkgconfig libX11-devel libXcursor-devel libXrandr-devel libXinerama-devel \
        Mesa-libGL-devel alsa-devel libpulse-devel freetype-devel openssl-devel libudev-devel \
        libGLU1
Ubuntu 
sudo apt-get install build-essential scons pkg-config libx11-dev libxcursor-dev libxinerama-dev \
    libgl1-mesa-dev libglu-dev libasound2-dev libpulse-dev libfreetype6-dev libssl-dev libudev-dev \
    libxrandr-dev

Compiling

Start a terminal, go to the root dir of the engine source code and type:

user@host:~/godot$ scons platform=x11

If all goes well, the resulting binary executable will be placed in the “bin” subdirectory. This executable file contains the whole engine and runs without any dependencies. Executing it will bring up the project manager.

Note

If you wish to compile using Clang rather than GCC, use this command:

user@host:~/godot$ scons platform=x11 use_llvm=yes

Using Clang appears to be a requirement for OpenBSD, otherwise fonts would not build.

Building export templates

To build X11 (Linux, *BSD) export templates, run the build system with the following parameters:

  • (32 bits)
user@host:~/godot$ scons platform=x11 tools=no target=release bits=32
user@host:~/godot$ scons platform=x11 tools=no target=release_debug bits=32
  • (64 bits)
user@host:~/godot$ scons platform=x11 tools=no target=release bits=64
user@host:~/godot$ scons platform=x11 tools=no target=release_debug bits=64

Note that cross compiling for the opposite bits (64/32) as your host platform is not always straight-forward and might need a chroot environment.

To create standard export templates, the resulting files must be copied to:

/home/youruser/.godot/templates

and named like this (even for *BSD which is seen as “Linux X11” by Godot):

linux_x11_32_debug
linux_x11_32_release
linux_x11_64_debug
linux_x11_64_release

However, if you are writing your custom modules or custom C++ code, you might instead want to configure your binaries as custom export templates here:

../../_images/lintemplates.png

You don’t even need to copy them, you can just reference the resulting files in the bin/ directory of your Godot source folder, so the next time you build you automatically have the custom templates referenced.