Building Arsenal

Note: Currently, building Arsenal involves manually compiling the separate components and copying them to the correct spot in the Blender plugin. This process will soon be automated using a makefile so that you don't have to manually structure the project during development.

Prerequisites

All OSes

For every OS you will need to have Rust installed. The easiest way to do that is with Rustup.

You also need Rust nightly and Rust 1.35 which can be installed with Rustup:

rustup toolchain install nightly
rustup toolchain install stable-2019-05-23

Windows and MacOS

On Windows and MacOS you need to install Python 3.7 which can be downloaded from Python.org.

Linux

On Linux you will need to install the Amethyst Dependencies and python3-dev.

Building Arsenal Blender Core

The Arsenal Blender Core (Core) is in the arsenal_blender_core directory in the git repository. The Core is a normal rust crate and can be built with Cargo.

cd arsenal_blender_core
cargo +nightly build

There is an optional feature for Core called enable_profiling that will dump a flamegraph to the current directory when executing the Blender export. This can be useful for investigation potential performance optimizations ( see Systems Performance Work Guided By Flamegraphs ).

cargo +nightly build --features enable_profiling

Once that finishes we can build the Arsenal Runtime.

Building Arsenal Runtime

The Arsenal Runtime is in the arsenal_runtime dir. The Arsenal Runtime is also built with Cargo:

cd arsenal_runtime
cargo +stable-2019-05-23 build

Packaging Arsenal Blender Plugin

After you have built Core and the Runtime, you have to copy the built assets to the arsenal_blender dir. On Linux and MacOS you can create symlinks to avoid having to re-copy the assets every time you rebuild them during development.

# Do this in the root of the repository. We assume you are using Git Bash on
# Windows.

# This is the same for all platforms
mkdir arsenal_blender/bin

# The library names are different for different platforms

# Windows
cp arsenal_runtime/target/debug/arsenal_runtime arsenal_blender/bin
cp arsenal_blender_core/target/debug/core.dll arsenal_blender/core.pyd

# Linux
ln -s ../../arsenal_runtime/target/debug/arsenal_runtime arsenal_blender/bin
ln -s ../arsenal_blender_core/target/debug/libcore.so arsenal_blender/core.so

# MacOS
ln -s ../../arsenal_runtime/target/debug/arsenal_runtime arsenal_blender/bin
ln -s ../arsenal_blender_core/target/debug/libcore.dylib arsenal_blender/core.so

After those are in place, you can copy, on Windows, or symlink, on Mac and Linux, the arsenal_blender dir to your blender Addons directory.

# Windows
cp arsenal_blender ${APPDATA}/Blender\ Foundation/Blender/2.80/scripts/addons

# Linux
ln -s /path/to/arsenal/arsenal_blender ~/.config/blender/2.8/scripts/addons

# MacOS
ln -s /path/to/arsenal/arsenal_blender /Users/yourusername/Library/Application\ Support/Blender/2.80/scripts/addons/

When that is done you just have to enable the plugin from the Blender interface and you are finished!

Arsenal Game Engine