libHSPlasma uses the CMake build system, which can generate project files for all major operating systems.

A typical build looks something like this:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..

On Unix-like systems (Linux, MacOSX) you should then be able to:

$ make
$ sudo make install

On Windows, make sure you have the required libraries as well as Visual Studio (Express Edition works fine), and then use the generated .sln files to compile.

Mac users can also generate XCode project files for libHSPlasma by specifying the XCode generator:

$ cmake -G XCode ..

Note that ARM, PowerPC, etc. compilations may work, but are completely unsupported for now.

libHSPlasma depends on the following libraries; you'll need to have the dev packages installed in order for libHSPlasma to compile successfully:

• string_theory
• zlib
• libjpeg-turbo
• libpng
• PhysX (Optional)

For libHSPlasmaNet

• OpenSSL 1.0+

For PyHSPlasma

• Python 3.2+

You will also need CMake and a C++ compiler with at least some C++11 support. The following compiler versions are currently supported (others may work, but are currently untested):

• GCC 4.6 or later
• Clang 3.0 or later
• Microsoft Visual C++ 2013 or later

When building with Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 or later, the recommended way to get all prerequisite libraries (except for PhysX) is with vcpkg. The recommended configuration is to build everything except Python as a static library. For now (as of Oct. 2020), Python needs to be built as a DLL in order for PyHSPlasma to correctly export its symbols. However, the built Python DLLs do NOT need to be distributed with the compiled .pyd files.

To make building the prerequisites simpler, you can use the libhsplasma-vcpkg.cmake file in the root of the libhsplasma source directory as a vcpkg toolchain file:

copy libhsplasma-vcpkg.cmake <Path to vcpkg>\triplets
cd <Path to vcpkg>
.\vcpkg install --triplet libhsplasma-vcpkg string-theory zlib libjpeg-turbo libpng openssl python3

(Note: use python2 instead of python3 when building PyHSPlasma for Python 2.7).

Then, when configuring libhsplasma with CMake, you can just point it to your vcpkg install directory with the custom triplet:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=<Path to vcpkg>\installed\libhsplasma-vcpkg;<Path to vcpkg>\installed\libhsplasma-vcpkg\debug ..