The following lists per-platform dependencies required to build from source.

Compiling OpenHV requires the following dependencies:

• Windows PowerShell >= 4.0 (included by default in recent Windows 10 versions)
• .NET 6 SDK (or via Visual Studio 2022)

To compile OpenHV, open the OpenHV.sln solution in the main folder, build it from the command-line with dotnet or use the Makefile analogue command make all scripted in PowerShell syntax.

Run the game with launch-game.cmd.

.NET 6 or Mono (version 6.4 or later) is required to compile OpenHV. We recommend using .NET 6 when possible, as Mono is incompletely packaged by most Linux distributions (e.g. missing the msbuild toolchain), and has been deprecated as a standalone project.

The .NET 6 download page provides repositories for various package managers and binary releases for several architectures. If you prefer to use Mono, we suggest adding the upstream repository for your distro to obtain the latest version and the msbuild toolchain.

To compile OpenHV, run make from the command line (or make RUNTIME=mono if using Mono). After this, one can run the game with ./launch-game.sh.

The default behavior on the x86_64 architecture is to download several pre-compiled native libraries using the Nuget packaging manager. If you prefer to use system libraries, compile instead using make TARGETPLATFORM=unix-generic.

If you choose to use system libraries, or your system is not x86_64, you will need to install SDL 2, FreeType, OpenAL, and liblua 5.1 before compiling OpenHV.

These can be installed using your package manager on various distros:

sudo pacman -S openal libgl freetype2 sdl2 lua51

sudo apt install libfreetype6 libopenal1 liblua5.1-0 libsdl2-2.0-0

sudo dnf install SDL2 freetype "lua = 5.1" openal-soft

sudo emerge -av media-libs/freetype:2 media-libs/libsdl2 media-libs/openal virtual/opengl '=dev-lang/lua-5.1.5*'

sudo dnf install SDL2 freetype "lib*lua5.1" "lib*freetype2" "lib*sdl2.0_0" openal-soft

sudo zypper in openal-soft freetype2 SDL2 lua51

sudo yum install SDL2 freetype "lua = 5.1" openal-soft

Type sudo make install for system-wide installation. Run sudo make install-linux-shortcuts to get startup scripts, icons and desktop files. You can then run the game by executing the openhv command. Alternatively, you can also run these mods by clicking on the desktop shortcut if you ran sudo make install-linux-shortcuts.

.NET 6 or Mono (version 6.4 or later) is required to compile OpenHV. We recommend using .NET 6 unless you are running a very old version of macOS (10.9 through 10.12).

To compile OpenHV, run make from the command line (or make RUNTIME=mono if using Mono). Run with ./launch-game.sh.