Building Irrlicht for Android in Visual Studio 2010

luthyr · Post by **luthyr** » Tue Apr 23, 2013 2:36 am

I was having problems understanding how to compile for Android and eventually came upon a pretty simple way to do it that also lets me debug and code in Visual Studio. NVIDIA put together an easy way to download all the Android dependencies as well as the ability to work in Visual Studio. I got it minimally working fairly quick, so I thought I would post my instructions if someone wanted to use this method or take it further.

Please read all of the instructions before trying. This requires Visual Studio 2010. (I’m not sure if an express edition works- I also had VS2010 SP1 installed).

Go to: https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-nsight-tegra
You’ll need to sign up for https://developer.nvidia.com/tegra-regi ... er-program to gain access to Tegra Insight. It may take a while for the automated email to be sent, granting access. After that, download Tegra Insight for Visual Studio. I chose to install ‘Everything’ which has a lot of the older Android SDKs.

This conveniently installs all the dependencies in one location, C:\NVPACK\, and sets up all the necessary environment paths/variables.

Be sure to wait for Tegra Insight to install everything- it’ll take a while.

Download this example project I made and extract anywhere!
https://mega.nz/#!fJUhHBKI!b_Kmy15IecSv ... h4jmrQ_228
I’m using ogl-es branch for this version of Irrlicht (revision 4512).

Open up irrAndroidProject\irrAndroidProject.sln

Make sure the build configuration platform is set to Android and not Win32. You should also try to run in Debug first.

Build the project! It should hopefully build successfully.

To run the project, I believe you need an Android device of some sort (it doesn’t have to be Tegra). I have not tried to use an emulator. I used a Nexus 7 to make this work, so if you have a different device, you may have to change the device resolution or other things. Be sure to set the device in debug/development mode. I’m not sure how new a version of Android this requires. It may need to be a recent device.

Run the project! The example I included was the one built for example 8 (Special FX).

Disclaimers/Notes:

Currently only got it to compile with GLES 2.0.
All compile options are currently set to statically link Irrlicht.
Using “Start Debugging” will not connect in Release, but you can “Start Without Debugging” to run a release build on the device.
I don’t really know how old a version of Android you can use since I am using a Nexus 7.
I don't know how this might affect existing Android dev setups. The Tegra Insight program seems to add user system variables rather than global.
I’m not sure where android_native_app_glue.h should properly be for Irrlicht, so I just dropped it in the include folder.