Visual Studio 2005

[Red Spot]

Thanks GSH, that set me of looking at some other settings.
I found out that:
A)I was an idiot for just building debug dll's
B)I had to generate .pdb files (somehow?)
C)Create a folder in the debug folder called 'redist'
D)Copy the .pdb files over to it
E)Build proper dll's based on the pb4a source files

Still not sure if these actually work. And it also failed to build the deathmatch01.dll as it couldnt find windows.h ?
It also seems VS2005 couldnt properly link some other files from the debug folder, but besides warnings didnt cause any errors.
Weird ...

I think I know what I will be doing this weekend 

[GSH]

If you can't find windows.h, then you need to download the platform sdk from MS. See the readme included with the DLL source. VS2008 includes the platform sdk, finally.

As to .pdb files, they help debug. Don't need to worry about them, yet. The .pdb files inside the redist folder are smaller, and don't contain full source code-- they have 'good enough' info to get a callstack dump on a crash, but not more. If you're debugging on your machine, just set the output folder for the DLLs to where BZ2 uses DLLs, and you shouldn't need to copy the .pdb, especially the redist pdb. Ship the redist pdb to end users, though.

-- GSH

[Red Spot]

Thanks for the info GSH. Still got to work out how to do the debugging, but it does explain why my pb4a build mpinstant.dll's have a twice as large .pdb file as the ones that actually come in pb4a.
It however works ok, at least what a 15 minute session in dunes showed where I saw the ai kill my recy and 2 turrets with an overwelming force ... fun

If you happen to have it onhand, do you know any good beginner tutorials? Ones that give a quick&dirty introduction of how VS2005 works, possibly how the debugging works?

[GSH]

There's some more comments on how to debug in the 1.3techalpha5 source code dist, just released. (It's built for VS2008, etc). Other than that, google around.

-- GSH

[Red Spot]

Whats in the source files is exactly that what I didnt find in the tutorials I found online, that I should link the debugger to battlezone itself.

I just did a quick test to see if I could build dll's from the ta5 source files. The debugger dll's worked ok, than the other dll's failed.
Repeated the process but now created a folder named 'redist' in the 'debug\mission' folder, the dll's build without a single warning ..