Building MAVS on Windows

This section discusses building Mavs on Windows. The [CMake GUI](https://cmake.org/download/) will be used to generate solutions for Microsoft Visual Studio. When installing Visual Studio, make sure you select the C and C++ compilers for your installation.

If you wish to build the MPI version of the code (not recommended for desktop computers), you will also need to install the Microsoft MPI compiler and SDK.

Installing MAVS on Windows

Create a directory in the MAVS folder called build. Start the CMake GUI and perform the following steps:

• Select the MAVS repo as the source directory and the select `./mavs/build` as the build directory.

• Click the Configure button and select the appropriate version of Visual Studio to populate the initial CMakeCache. New options should appear highlighted in red.

• For a basic OpenMP-enable MAVS build, set the following options:

  • DEFAULT_DATA_DIR: ./mavs/data

  • CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX: ./mavs/build

    • It is recommended that you install MAVS in your mavs/install folder. Administrator privileges are needed to install MAVS to the default location in `Program Files`.

  • CMAKE_CONFIGURATION_TYPE: Release

• Configure once more

• Click Generate to generate solutions

• Click Open Project to open the solutions in Visual Studio

• Build the solution (Ctrl + Shift + B)

If you get build errors related to ReactPhysics3D (RP3D): In your CMake dialog box, uncheck "BUILD_SHARED_LIBS", reconfigure, and rebuild.

The mavs .dll files will be installed to mavs/build/bin. You will need to add this folder location to your system path to use the MAVS python interface.