Widelands

Widelands is a free, open source real-time strategy game with singleplayer campaigns and a multiplayer mode. The game was inspired by Settlers II™ (© Bluebyte) but has significantly more variety and depth to it.

License

GPL v2+. Some assets are released under various Creative Commons licenses – see the respective folders.

Download

On how to download Widelands, see https://www.widelands.org/wiki/Download/

Compiling

We support compiling Widelands for Linux, Windows under MSys2 and MSVC, and MacOS with GCC >= 8 or Clang/LLVM >= 7, though it might work with other compilers too. We have more detailed documentation available at: https://www.widelands.org/wiki/BuildingWidelands/

Dependencies

You will need to install the following dependencies:

• libSDL >=2.0
• libSDL_image
• libSDL_mixer >= 2.0
• libSDL_ttf >= 2.0
• gettext
• libiconv (on same mirrors as gettext)
• zlib
• libpng
• Asio
• Python >= 1.5.2
• libglew or glbinding

Compiling with our convenience script

You can then compile by running our convenience script.

Command	Purpose
./compile.sh	Full debug build
./compile.sh -r -w	Release build
./compile.sh -e -w	Release build with debugging symbols
./compile.sh -h	List available options

When compiling has finished, you can call Widelands with

./widelands

Compiling with CMake

You can also call CMake manually:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

When compiling has finished, you can call Widelands with

cd ..
mv build/src/widelands .
./widelands

We have various CMake options available. For example, to create a release build, call

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..

For using the Ninja build system, call

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G Ninja ..
ninja

Depending on the Ninja installation, the last line can also be ninja-build.

CMake options

Note that CMake options are prefixed with -D. These are the available options:

Name	Values	Default	Function
CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE	Debug/Release/RelWithDebInfo	Debug	Create a release or debug build
OPTION_ASAN	ON/OFF	ON for Debug builds /OFF for Release builds	Use AddressSanitizer. Switching this off only works once. You will have to clear the build directory if you want to switch this off again in a later build.
OPTION_TSAN	ON/OFF	OFF	Use ThreadSanitizer. Mutually exclusive with OPTION_ASAN.
OPTION_BUILD_CODECHECK	ON/OFF	ON	Build codecheck. Only available in Debug builds.
OPTION_BUILD_WEBSITE_TOOLS	ON/OFF	ON	Build website-related tools
OPTION_BUILD_TESTS	ON/OFF	ON	Build unit tests
CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX	A directory	See CMake documentation	Define the target directory for the "install" target, e.g. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~/widelands-install.
WL_INSTALL_BINDIR	A directory	${CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX}/games	Define the destination of executables files (if installing)
WL_VERSION	A version string	Autodetected from git/bzr, or set by adding a VERSION file	Define the Widelands version
USE_FLTO_IF_AVAILABLE	ON/OFF	Autodetected	Use link-time optimization
USE_XDG	ON/OFF	ON	Follow XDG-Basedir specification. Only available on Linux.
OPTION_USE_GLBINDING	ON/OFF	OFF	Use glbinding instead of GLEW
OPTION_GLEW_STATIC	ON/OFF	OFF	Use static GLEW Library
OPTION_BUILD_WINSTATIC	ON/OFF	OFF	Build a static linked .exe on windows
OPTION_FORCE_EMBEDDED_MINIZIP	ON/OFF	OFF	Used embedded minizip sources (skip checking for installed minizip library)
NEEDS_EXTERNAL_FILESYSTEM	ON/OFF	Autodetected from compiler version	Whether std::filesystem needs to be linked against an extra library

make/ninja targets

You can add targets to the make or ninja command, e.g. make codecheck to only run the code check suite. These are the available targets:

Name	Function
ALL or no target	Compile everything, up to executable with the settings from the cmake call
codecheck	Run the codechecks
doc	Generate Doxygen documentation. Currently only with Build Type Debug, but this is easily changed if necessary.
install	Install into the target dir, this is /usr/local per default (you need root privileges!) unless you change it (see CMake options above)

Contributing

We have some instructions on how to use Git to help you if you're new to Git: https://www.widelands.org/wiki/GitPrimer/

Code

The master branch and all issues and pull requests are mirrored bidirectionally between our developer environments on Codeberg and GitHub by bunnybot. Bunnybot also formats the code (C++, Lua, and Python) in all mirrored branches.

We follow the Google Styleguide.

Scenarios

For scripting scenarios, see https://www.widelands.org/documentation/lua_index/

Art

For contributing art, see https://www.widelands.org/wiki/GraphicsDevelopment/

Translations

For contributing translations, see https://www.widelands.org/wiki/TranslatingWidelands/

Testing

For helping with testing, see https://www.widelands.org/wiki/TestingBranches/

Triaging Issues

For helping with issue management, see https://www.widelands.org/wiki/TriagingBugs/

AI-Generated Content Policy

Please do not submit content generated purely or largely by or with Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or Large Language Models (AI, ML, LLMs). We will not accept such content as it conflicts with the objectives of the Widelands project.

We hold that AI-generated content generally stands on dubious ethical and legal grounds, as it violates the copyright of creators whose work was scraped for the AI's training data set without their permission and without due attribution. Also, we find that it is frequently of low overall quality and/or is overly generic and fails to embrace requirements specific to Widelands.

Pull requests that have been generated by AI may be closed immediately in order to prevent their time-consuming and often fruitless reviews and discussions.

Widelands is created by people, for people.

Directory Structure

Directory	Contents
cmake	Build system and codecheck rules
data	The game's data files. Images, sounds, music, scripting, maps, campaigns, tribes, ...
debian	Packaging for Debian-based Linux distributions
doc	Sphinx documentation
src	C++ source code
test	Scripted maps for our regression test suite
utils	Diverse utilities: Building translations, code formatting, packaging Mac & Windows, ...
xdg	Files related to X Desktop Group Base Directory Specification

Obtaining MacOS and MS-Windows builds and testsuite runs

All pushes to master will be built on AppVeyor. Pull request branches are deployed for MS-Windows using a GitHub action. To obtain MS-Windows builds if you do not wish to open a pull request, temporarily add the name of your branch to the branches section in appveyor.yml. This will not work if the branch is in a fork though.

All pull request branches as well as master are additionally deployed for MacOS, and a testsuite checks them under various compilers. To obtain MacOS builds or testsuite results, temporarily add the name of your branch to the branches section in .github/workflows/build.yaml. This does work for branches in forks as well.