Installing ARCS

Please notice that this procedure is only for the current version of ARCS.

The installation of ARCS has to follow several steps:

• Install Qt, version 4.3+ (required dependency – also works with Qt5.x). You may install Qt from its site but do not forget your linux distribution (if you use one) is more likely to already have a package for Qt;
• Download ARCS;
• Build ARCS from the sources.

To compile ARCS, you will need to export several environment libraries.

export ARCSDIR=/path/to/ARCS/sources
export PATH=$PATH:$ARCSDIR/bin
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$ARCSDIR/lib

This allows to tell where ARCS sources are put and where executables as well as libraries will be found. If you intend to use ARCS in a dedicated directory (i.e. without installing it on the system), you might be interested in putting these environment variables into a .bashrc or .profile file in your home directory.

The usual procedure to build ARCS from sources is then the following one:

tar xvf arcs2-current.tar.gz 
cd ARCS2-YYYY-MM-DD
qmake
make

This could be translated as:

1. Unpack the archive;
2. Go into the unpacked directory;
3. Run the qmake utility from Qt framework in order to generate a Makefile;
4. Build sources.

A few optional steps may be performed:

• make docs: will generate doxygen documentation;
• make install: will install ARCS on the system.

You must set several environment variables in order to compile ARCS. Under Windows XP, you will have to right click on My computer, choose the entry Property, the Advanced tab, and then the button Environment variables. You should add two different variables :

• QMAKESPEC with the value win32-msvc.net if you are using Visual Studio .net or Visual Studio Express ;
• QTDIR with the value c:\qt4 or another value if you have unpacked the archive elsewhere.

You should also add to the PATH environment variable the value c:\qt4\bin.

You will have to do the following steps :

• Unpack the archive ;
• Open a command line inside the directory obtained after unpacking the archive ;
• Launch qmake ;
• Open the file with the extension .vcproj using Visual and select the release configuration ;
• Build the project under Visual ;
• At the end of the process you should have all that is required to have a minimalist ARCS framework working under Microsoft Windows.

The next step is to check the engine is well installed and behaves well.