Compiling under VS2008

In this tutorial you will learn how to get the Source SDK up and running with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. There are several things you're going to have to do to get it working.

Create a new project

If you haven't already, you need to create a new SDK project.

• Under the tool section of your steam client, launch the Source SDK.
• Click "Create a Mod".
• Choose one of the options(in this tutorial I used Hl2MP).
• Select a path to install it to, preferably not in your Steam folders. It's recommend C:/*MODNAMEHERE*, as it'll be easy for you or anyone else to find if you need some files.

You should now have a fresh SDK installation in the folder you selected.

Copying files

To do all of this in a non-destructive way, we must copy our VS2005 files and make a new solution.

• Copy src/Game_HL2MP-2005.sln and rename the copy to Game_HL2MP-2008.sln.
• Copy src/cl_dll/client_hl2mp-2005.vcproj and rename the copy to client_hl2mp-2008.vcproj.
• Copy src/dlls/server_hl2mp-2005.vcproj and rename the copy to server_hl2mp-2008.vcproj.

Note:If you are using the Orange box source code, you will need to copy Game_HL2MP-2005.sln, game\client\client_hl2mp-2005.vcproj and game\server\server_hl2mp-2005.vcproj and replace 2005 with 2008.

You'll now have created a new project to work with. This is important, as you don't want to go around messing up your entire SDK installation if you mess up.

Modifying files

With that done, we can now go ahead and modify our setup.

• Open the newly created Game_HL2MP-2008.sln in a text editor.
• You should see 2 strings, cl_dll\client_hl2mp-2005.vcproj and dlls\server_hl2mp-2005.vcproj. Change the 2005 in both of them to 2008.

Note:If you are using the Orange Box version of the source code, the paths will be different, but you can still simply change the 2005 to 2008.

• Open Game_HL2MP-2008.sln in Visual Studio 2008. You will be prompted to upgrade the project files.
• At the first section of the upgrade process, you are asked if you want to create a backup before converting.
• We want to select "No". Wait for the conversion process to complete, then press the Finish button. You should now automatically launch into your newly converted solution.

We don't need to backup anything because we did a better manual backup ourselves. It's OK if the conversion process tells you that it complied with a few warnings, as this is normal. This SDK was originally meant for VS2005, so there's bound to be some problems.

Setting up Mircosoft SDK's

You will now need to install the following, The DirectX SDK and Microsoft Platform SDK then follow the instructions below to include them in the build process

Files

• MS DirectX SDK

Go to Tools - Options: Projects and Solutions - VC++ Directories

Note:Vista users, having downloaded the Microsoft Windows SDK, will not have a path containing Microsoft Platform SDK. The correct path (if the Windows SDK is installed with the download above and it's default install paths), to substitute in to the appropriate paths below, appears to be "...\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\vx.x\..." Installing the Windows SDK does not make a difference in paths to the DirectX SDK, except the version may not have been released in the same month and hence may not have the same month in parenthesis in the folder path.

• Then select "Include files" and add "...\Microsoft DirectX SDK (November 2007)\Include"

• Then select "Library files" and add "...\Microsoft DirectX SDK (November 2007)\Lib\x86"

Finally, in the Solution Explorer right click 'client_hl2', and select Properties, then:

• In the client_hl2 properties window, navigate to Linker -> Input
• Select the 'Additional Properties' row. Then click the '...' on the right hand side of the row
• If there is already an entry here, take a new line after it (a space will suffice if you cannot create a new line), and type ' user32.lib ' without the quotes.
• Repeat these steps for 'server_hl2'

Important changes

Now it's time to go into our new solution and adjust some important settings.

If you have tried to compile already, you would have gotten some nasty errors. To fix this, we must suppress some libraries and make some other changes.

First, we need to make sure we're compiling in Release HL2MP.

• Right-click on "Solution Game_HL2MP-2008" in your Solution Explorer and select Properties.
• Click the Configuration Properties option.
• Under the Configuration tab in the table that appears on the right of the window, use the selection box to change or verify that both solutions are set to "Release HL2MP". Once you've done this, press Apply, then OK.

You might think we're all done, but if you compiled right now, you'd find that you still get errors and whole lot of warnings. The warnings are just fine, but those stupid errors are the only thing preventing you from compiling correctly. Luckily, there's an easy fix; just compile the 'client_hl2mp' first, then the 'server_hl2mp' - it's that simple!

Your SDK installation should now be fully operational. You might still get some warnings, but you shouldn't get any more errors on your first build if you followed these steps. I recommend you build now while the installation is still fresh so you don't have to do this again and so you know everything is working the way it should. If you are still getting errors, keep retrying this tutorial until you don't anymore, as I've confirmed this works.