Orbiter

Orbiter is now published as an Open Source project under the MIT License (see LICENSE file for details). To compile Orbiter from its sources, you need Microsoft Visual Studio. Orbiter has been successfully built with VS Community 2019, but other versions should also work. Note that VS2019 comes with built-in CMake support, so you don't need a separate CMake installation. Some configuration caveats: If you are using the Ninja generator (default for the VS built-in CMake), you may also need vspkg to configure the VS toolset. If you are using the VS2019 generator, you may need to set up Visual Studio to use only a single thread for the build. This is because some of the build tools (especially those for generating the Orbiter documentation) are not threadsafe, and the VS2019 generator doesn't understand the CMake JOB POOL directive. If you want to build the documentation, you need a few additional tools: a filter to convert ODT and DOC sources to PDF, such as LibreOffice. a LaTeX compiler suite such as MiKTeX. Doxygen for building the source-level documentation for developers. The Orbiter git repository does not include most of the planetary texture files required for running Orbiter. You need to install those separately. The easiest way to do so is by installing an Orbiter release. Optionally you can also install high-resolution versions of the textures from the Orbiter website. You should keep the Orbiter installation separate from your Orbiter git repository. Alternatively, you can configure the texture directory after building Orbiter by setting the PlanetTexDir entry in Orbiter.cfg . Help files are located in the Doc subfolder (if you built them). Orbiter User Manual.pdf is the main Orbiter user manual. The in-game help system can be opened via the "Help" button on the Orbiter Launchpad dialog, or with Alt-F1 while running Orbiter. Remaining questions can be posted on the Orbiter user forum at orbiter-forum.com.