Preface

If you don't plan on modifying the engine, then you can grab binaries from FTE's website and move the binaries for your platform into the root directory of Nuclide.

Dependencies

Nuclide is entirely game-logic oriented, so it only requires a working QuakeC compiler. In our case FTEQCC. Which you can also build with:

$ make fteqcc

The resulting binary ./fteqcc will then be used to build the game-logic related targets.

Besides a working C compiler, such as gcc or clang, the QuakeC compiler shouldn't need any other dependencies. Click here for a full list of dependencies for the various optional components.

Note: make help will always show a list of available targets, including their purpose.

Keeping Up-To-Date

You can issue the following to check for updates of tools/dependencies:

$ make update

Building Game-Logic

You can build games by running the following command:

$ make game GAME=base

Adjust the GAME argument to select which game you want to build. The game base is the assumed, default target.

Usually, the resulting files are progs.dat, csprogs.dat and (sometimes) menu.dat. Those are the libraries dealing with the Server, Client and Menu aspect of the game respectively.

They are accompanied by name-matching .lno files. These contain extra debugging information helpful to the engine. They can be stripped from a shipping build of your game.

Note: You do not need to rebuild the logic for each and every platform. The results will be identical, since QuakeC is not machine code!

Building the Engine

Issue the following to build a generic, non-branded version of the engine FTE:

$ make fteqw

Which you can then use to run 'Test Game' with ./fteqw +game base. For more information on launching games, mods, check out the page on Launching.

Note: Some engine features are only available as a plugin. See the section on plugins for details.

Building a Branded Build

If you want to build a custom version of the engine, with custom branding and the ability to strip unneeded functionality out of the binary, you can make a copy of ThirdParty/fteqw/engine/common/config_fteqw.h, adjust it and save it under your game directory as engine.h. When issuing the command:

$ make engine GAME=yourgame

It will then look for yourgame/engine.h, and build a copy of FTEQW against it. The output will normally be something along the lines of yourgame_x64.

Note: The name can be changed by passing NAME=YourGame to the make program, or by placing a file named PROJECT in your game directory with a short name on the first line.

Building plugins

You can build plugins for your game by specifying NATIVE_PLUGINS as an argument to the make command, like so:

make plugins GAME=base NATIVE_PLUGINS="ode ffmpeg"

However, once you've settled on a set of plugins for your game, you can list the contents of the NATIVE_PLUGINS string in a file named PLUGINS in your game directory.

Note: For generic builds of FTE you can use the target fteqw-plugins instead of plugins. You shouldn't specify a GAME argument however.

Building a dedicated server build

If you want a minimal, dedicated server binary for your game that doesn't include all the code related to being a client, you can issue:

make dedicated GAME=yourgame

And it will, much like a branded build, compile a dedicated binary specific to your game configuration.

Building the Level Editor

See the page dedicated to level editing for more information.