Thanks for responding!
If you download and install Visual Studio 2015
Just googled it and found https://www.visualstudio.com. Which one do I pick? I found another link to the windows store. Visual Studio 2015 was priced in the thousands of dollars...
(I know, $5,999? Visual Studio 2010 allowed auto-generation of MakeFile.am, but that version of 2015 doesn't.)
Yep, if it were simple, clear, and reasonably priced, asking for help compiling wouldn't be the most common thread on this forum.
(Urgh, they even changed the site layout from when I downloaded Visual Studio last year.)
Make sure of the following.
1: You have an internet connection that can download a several GB file and install it without needing to interrupt the connection.
(Fairly common, but not everyone has one.)
2: Your copy of Windows 10 is completely legal.
(No judgements, and can be circumvented the same way as item #1.)
3: Object Oriented Programming, Test Driven Development, vector<String>.
You know what at least two of these three items mean without looking them up. You don't need to be able to use them, just know what they are as a baseline.
(If you're familiar with vector<String> but not the other two, then you are in the opposite place I was last year.)
Still here? Good.
https://www.visualstudio.com/On the Visual Studio page, select Download, followed by:
Visual Studio Community
Free, fully-featured IDE for students, open-source and individual developers
vs_community__[bunch of weird letters].exe
209 KB binary file
Run the installer.
Make sure anything with "C++" or "SDK" in the name is set to install.
But you can skip anything with "C#", "Mobile", or "Android" in its name or description.
Beyond that, any customization options are your choice, just keep clicking "next" if you're not sure, but keep an eye out for free trials and search bars they might attempt to trick you into installing. Especially Bing.
[Once Installed]
.vcxproj files should automatically become associated with Visual Studio Community 2015, allowing you to open the file and VS will take care of most of the rest.
Select whatever appearance you like.
Somewhere along the top few bars of the GUI will be the word "Debug" or the word "Release". Set it to "Release" if it isn't already.
Along the side of the screen there should be a box labeled "Solution Explorer", or possibly "Project Solution" or "crimesquad".
Right click it and select "Build Solution", or "Rebuild Solution", or "Build All", that will compile the program and export the .exe in the folder \Release
For this first run they all do the same thing, since this project only has a single solution.
This should take a few minutes to compile. If it completes immediately, select "Rebuild" (the goal here isn't to compile, it's to make sure the computer can compile the project)
Visual Studio will generate a bunch of .obj files and crimesquad.exe
This .exe file will have a filesize of either 1MB or 10MB. Either way, it works and should run properly, so long as it is run from a directory that contains all the data files and natives for LCS (mainly the .dll files and the art folder (music optional)).
If it compiles and runs, you're done.
If the file is 10MB it will still work fine, just oversized (and technically it will run faster, but that's not normally a concern in LCS, which is why we aim for the 1MB version).
That should be everything you need.