Using CMake is considered stable, but not every single combination is known to work. Using the defaults as suggested should cause minimal problems.

At first, you have to install CMake.

The common way of installing CMake is to go to CMake's download page. At this time of writing, the latest versions are 3.3.0-rc3 and 3.2.3. Either version will work: the minimum version supported at this time is 2.8.12.

If this approach is used, consider using the binary distributions. Most should also provide a friendly GUI interface.

For those that prefer package manager systems, Chocolatey has a CMake package. Run choco install cmake to get the latest stable version.

For those that prefer package manager systems, both Homebrew and MacPorts offer CMake as part of their offerings. Run brew install cmake or port install cmake respectively to get the latest stable version.

There are many package managers available for Linux. Look at your manual for more details. Either that, or utilize the All OS specific approach.

There are two ways of working with cmake: the command line and the GUI.

If you are unfamiliar with cmake, first run cmake --help. This will present a list of options and generators. The generators are used for setting up your project.

The following steps will assume you operate from the StepMania project's Build directory.

For the first setup, you will want to run this command:

cmake -G {YourGeneratorHere} .. && cmake ..

Replace {YourGeneratorHere} with one of the generator choices from cmake --help. As an example, Mac OS X users that want to have Xcode used would run cmake -G Xcode .. && cmake .. on their Terminal program.

If you are building on Windows and expecting your final executable to be able to run on Windows XP, append an additional parameter -T "v140_xp" (or -T "v120_xp", depending on which version of Visual Studio you have installed) to your command line.

If any cmake project file changes, you can just run cmake .. && cmake .. to get up to date. If this by itself doesn't work, you may have to clean the cmake cache. Use rm -rf CMakeCache.txt CMakeScripts/ CMakeFiles/ cmake_install.txt to do that, and then run the generator command again as specified above.

The reason for running cmake at least twice is to make sure that all of the variables get set up appropriately.

Environment variables can be modified at this stage. If you want to pass -ggdb or any other flag that is not set up by default, utilize CXXFLAGS or any appropriate variable.

For those that use the GUI to work with cmake, you need to specify where the source code is and where the binaries will be built. The first one, counter-intuitively, is actually the parent directory of this one: the main StepMania directory. The second one for building can be this directory.

Upon setting the source and build directories, you should Configure the build. If no errors show up, you can hit Generate until none of the rows on the GUI are red.

If the cmake project file changes, you can just generate the build to get up to date. If this by itself doesn't work, you may have to clean the cmake cache. Go to File -> Delete Cache, and then run the Configure and Generate steps again.

If you are generating makefiles with cmake, you will also need to specify your build type. Most users will want to use RELEASE while some developers may want to use DEBUG.

When generating your cmake files for the first time (or after any cache delete), pass in -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug for a debug build. We have RelWithDbgInfo and MinSizeRel builds available as well.

It is advised to clean your cmake cache if you switch build types.

Note that if you use an IDE like Visual Studio or Xcode, you do not need to worry about setting the build type. You can edit the build type directly in the IDE.

With that, you should be good to go. If there are still questions, view the resources on the parent directory's README.md file.