Need Help Building for Windows (Latest Branch)

[chaojian-zhang]

Hi Celestia community! I am having real trouble trying to build this from source - so far I've only managed to generate .sln file using CMake on the master branch but haven't been able to successfully build anything.

Since I came late and don't have an account, I couldn't ask in the forum, and I wish someone can help me understand how to build on Windows with latest codebase - or any branch of it really.

I've tried:

## Celestia

git clone https://github.com/CelestiaProject/Celestia
git submodule update --init
set VCPKG_DOWNLOADS=C:\Applications\VCPKGDownloads
vcpkg new --application
vcpkg add port libpng gettext gettext[tools] libjpeg-turbo lua fmt glew eigen3 libepoxy luajit freetype gperf boost-container boost-smart-ptr
vcpkg install

set ROOT=C:\Project\Celestia\vcpkg_installed\x64-windows
cmake -S . -B build ^
  -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -A x64 ^
  -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE="C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\VC\vcpkg\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmake" ^
  -DENABLE_QT6=FALSE -DENABLE_WIN=TRUE -DENABLE_NLS=TRUE -DUSE_ICU=TRUE -DUSE_WIN_ICU=TRUE ^
  -DLIBEPOXY_INCLUDE_DIR=%ROOT%\include ^
  -DLIBEPOXY_LIBRARY=%ROOT%\lib\epoxy.lib ^
  -DLIBEPOXY_LIBRARY_DEBUG=%ROOT%\debug\lib\epoxy.lib

## Celestia Content

git clone https://github.com/CelestiaProject/CelestiaContent.git
cd CelestiaContent
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DImageMagick_magick_EXECUTABLE="C:\Program Files\ImageMagick-7.1.2-Q16-HDRI\magick.exe" -DImageMagick_convert_EXECUTABLE="C:\Program Files\ImageMagick-7.1.2-Q16-HDRI\magick.exe" -DImageMagick_identify_EXECUTABLE="C:\Program Files\ImageMagick-7.1.2-Q16-HDRI\magick.exe" -DENABLE_NLS=OFF

For Celestia, I am encountering issues related to Lua, depending on whether I include luajit.

With luajit:

Without luajit:

For CelestiaContent, I think probably I will need the older Image Magick legacy CLI utilities, but I don't know what to do with the generated solution files.

If you are interested, you can take a detailed look at my approach:

• No explanation (YouTube)
• With explanation (YouTube)
• Troubleshooting Progress

Another I don't quite understand is according to ci.yml, we are building with QT6 and WIN simultaneously ON: how is that the case? Since I thought we need to pick only one out of the four frontends?

Many thanks for your help!

[375gnu]

Could you try building using the same vcpg version as our CI does? https://github.com/CelestiaProject/Celestia/blob/master/.github/workflows/ci.yml#L38

Another I don't quite understand is according to ci.yml, we are building with QT6 and WIN simultaneously ON: how is that the case? Since I thought we need to pick only one out of the four frontends?

No, we can build as many frontends simultaneously as we want (if they're supported on our OS of course). You get several binaries (celestia-qt6, celestia-win, etc).

[chaojian-zhang]

Thanks for the reply!
Will try and let you know.

[ajtribick]

For the case of ImageMagick, unfortunately the CMake module relies on finding mogrify.exe, which no longer exists as of ImageMagick 7. I've raised a bug in the CMake project but so far it hasn't been fixed.

However if you pass -DImageMagick_EXECUTABLE_DIR="<path to directory containing magick.exe>" to cmake it should work

[ev3nvy]

I just ran into this myself, after updating all of my vcpkg packages. Checking out a previous version of vcpkg and installing older versions of all dependencies didn't help, I had to nuke my entire vcpkg installation instead.

I was able to successfully compile using the 2025.02.14 release of vcpkg. It's likely that significantly newer releases work, but I have yet to try them.

I'll try to bisect and figure out the cause once I have a little more time on my hands.

[ajtribick]

Works fine for me (MSVC 2026, CMake 4.2) with the latest vcpkg. Since you didn't say what is going wrong, it is difficult to guess why it is failing for you. Maybe you need to re-run bootstrap-vcpkg.bat to pick up the correct version of vcpkg.exe?