Compile AGS without having bought Visual Studio 2008

[CisBetter]

I tried to make changes to the AGS Engine and Editor, but after searching for almost one week for Visual Studio 2008 (Professional) the only thing I found was Visual Studio 2008 Express.
Is there a way to contribute code to AGS without being the lucky one who downloaded/bought VS 2008 8 years ago?

[Crimson Wizard]

Unfortunately, we need to deal with the precompiled libraries first to make it possible to work in any arbitrary Visual Studio. This was not adressed before mainly because there were not many who were willing to contribute to Windows version and did not own 2008 studio at the same time (actually not many contributors in general), while we were swarmed with other tasks.
Still I have to admit its a big shame we still did not do that in time.

I believe we may attempt to do it now, since the major version is just released, but it is hard to tell beforehand how long that will take (days, weeks?), because of two reasons: a) some of those precompiled libraries were modified by original author of AGS, b) some of the source codes of those particular versions of libraries may not be available, and we will have to use newer versions, wich may or may not precisely match original behavior.
NOTE: we already know of some issues because we use newer libraries on Linux, these were never properly solved, but rather temporarily covered with hacks.

This means that we may have to not simply change the building process to use source code instead of linking to existing libs, but also deal with compatibility issues.
Again, this is all doable, but will take undetermined time.
EDIT oh well, since I am responsible for this, I will do preliminary research in following days.


Regarding current situation, there are things you may actually try:

[pirate]
- You may get Visual Studio 2008 of some torrent if that's not against your pirate morale codex.
[/pirate]

- We have an automated build server. If you do pull request to our repository on github, it will automatically compile your version of code, and produce either complete output or error log. You may even use this for your own experimentation, just don't forget to explain this in pull request's comments. You will put in code, and get compiled program from the server. It is far from ideal (commiting code + downloading result + possible response delays), but absolutely possible.

- You may try to get sources for all the 3rd party libraries (Allegro 4, etc) required for engine and build them yourself with your own visual studio, or get compiled libraries from the web and use them to compile Engine and Editor. There is no guarantee that program will work identically in all aspects (as I explained above), but at least it will be working, and you will have an opportunity to test your changes.
Of course, we won't take your changes to solution and libraries (unless you completely deal with all the related issues, that is), but we will still be able to check and potentially accept your code, if your pull request will contain ONLY the changes unrelated to Studio change.

- You may compile Editor in any Studio, if you run AGS.Editor.NoNative solution and work only on C# code. In this case you will have to get compiled C++ editor component (AGS.Native.dll) and engine (acwin.exe) from one of our releases (e.g. most recent 3.4.0 one).

[CisBetter]

Thank you for replying so fast! After another night of searching I've found a direct link to the VS 2008 Pro. 90 Day Trial.
I'll try to make some changes and (if the changes work) share them on the GitHub page of AGS (as Pull Request)
-CisBetter

[Crimson Wizard]

There is now an experimental branch which can potentially be worked with using newer versions of MSVS:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=51021.msg636540905#msg636540905

Corectness is not guaranteed yet, still need to do more testing and make sure other people can follow build instructions.

[monkey0506]

I can confirm that using CW's branch (plus a few pull requests I've made: #349, #351, #352), the engine and editor (including AGS.Editor.Full.sln, not just AGS.Editor.NoNative.sln) can be built using Visual Studio 2015 Community (which is free!).

The official project files may not be able to be upgraded for some time due to other concerns, as CW explained above, but that will allow you to fully build everything without the Professional edition of Visual Studio.