🏗️Building FlatRedBall From Source
Introduction
All of FlatRedBall, including the editor and the core engine, is open source. If you are using FlatRedBall in your game, you may want to use source. Specifically you may want to:
Build the FlatRedBall Editor (aka Glue) from source to get the most up-to-date features and code generation
Link your game to source to improve debugging. For information on how to do this, see the Linking Games to FlatRedBall page.
Building FlatRedBall from source is not required to use FlatRedBall.
Most users do not need to follow the steps outlined in this section. New users are encouraged to skip this and head over to the Tutorials section. If you would like to build FlatRedBall to do more advanced debugging, contribute to the project, or out of pure curiosity then feel free to continue through this section.
If you are interested in using FlatRedBall in a code-only project, see the Code-Only Projects page.
Downloading FlatRedBall and Gum Source
You first need to clone FlatRedBall and Gum (two separate repositories) whether you are going to run the FlatRedBall or link your game to source.
Currently all development is being done on the NetStandard branch:
If you plan on using FlatRedBall FNA, be sure that you include all submodules when pulling FlatRedBall. This may automatically happen if you are using some Git clients (such as GitHub Desktop), but you may need to perform additional configuration if using a client that doesn't pull submodules by default (such as Rider).
FlatRedBall uses Gum UI including at runtime. This is also open source and can be found on GitHub:
Both repositories should be cloned to the same folder to make linking easier.
Installing Multi Platform Workloads
FlatRedBall Editor (Glue) links a version of FlatRedBall which builds for multiple platforms including Android and iOS. You must have an installiation that supports these platforms even if you are only building the FlatRedBall Editor.
Be sure to install both workloads:
.NET Multi-platform App UI development
.NET desktop development
Downloading FlatRedBall Source
The easiest way to download and keep FlatRedBall source up to date is to use a Github client such as Github for Desktop. To download source using Github for Desktop:
Install Github for Desktop
Select File -> Clone Repository
Select the URL tab
Enter the FlatRedBall URL: https://github.com/vchelaru/FlatRedBall. Keep the default folder as FlatRedBall
Switch to the appropriate branch. The default branch is NetStandard
After FlatRedBall is cloned, you will have a local copy on your machine.
Downloading Gum Source
You will also need to download Gum source, as FlatRedBall games which link against source also reference Gum files. To do this (assuming Github for Desktop):
Select File -> Clone Repository
Select the URL tab
Enter the Gum source: https://github.com/vchelaru/Gum . Keeping the default folder is recommended, but if not, be sure to use the same root as the FlatRedBall clone above.
Building the FlatRedBall Editor (Glue)
Verify that you have .NET 6 SDK installed https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet/thank-you/sdk-6.0.309-windows-x64-installer
To build the FlatRedBall Editor (also referred to as Glue):
Download the FlatRedBall repository (either clone it or download the .zip file from Github) following the steps above
Download the Gum repository following the steps above. Make sure to download it to the same folder where you downloaded the FlatRedBall repository, and name the folder Gum. See below for an example. If you do not do this, you will have reference errors when opening the solution.
Open the file <FlatRedBall Root>\FRBDK\Glue\Glue with All.sln.
To rebuild Glue with all plugins, select Build -> Build Solution in Visual Studio. You must Build or Rebuild the first time you run FlatRedBall. If you make further changes to any plugins, you must either build the entire solution, or build the project that contains the plugin. Simply building the Glue project, or pressing F5 to build and run Glue, will not build all plugins.\
Set Glue as the Startup Project
Building the solution creates an .exe from which the FRB editor can be run. You can find this .exe at <your git repo location>\FlatRedBall\FRBDK\Glue\Glue\bin\Debug\GlueFormsCore.exe. Alternatively, you can start up the FRB editor from Visual Studio. Doing so in Debug Mode allows you to see error messages in case the FRB editor throws an exception.
It's important that Gum and FlatRedBall are checked out to the same folder. For example, you may have:
c:/MyDocuments/FlatRedBall
c:/MyDocuments/Gum
Troubleshooting
Gum Project References Broken
The Glue project references Gum projects, so the two project folders must be in the same root folder. To verify:
Open Glue with All.sln
Open the Solution Explorer
Expand the GumProjects folder
If the references are correct, your window should look similar to the following image:
If your references are broken, then you may see something similar to the following image:
Notice that the projects are marked as unloaded. To solve this make sure that both of the projects (FlatRedBall and Gum) are in the same root folder. If you unzipped the files, then they may need to be moved up one folder.
Microsoft.Windows.UI.Xaml.CSharp.targets was not found...
When opening the project, you may get a message which states:
For information on how to solve this problem, see the following link: http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/8a67c0/visual-studio-2015-feature-shared-project-part-2/
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