Setting up Windows computer for DeveloperZone compilation and developing new CC3D plugins and Steppables in C++

If you want tot develop plugins and steppables under windows you will need to install free Visual Studio 2015 Community Version. The installation of this package is straightforward but you need to make sure that you are installing C/C++ compilers when the installer gives you options to select which programming languages you would like to have support for. The best way to download Visual Studio is to get it directly from Microsoft website. Current link to visual studio download page is here: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/older-downloads/ . Just make sure you scroll down and find Visual Studio 2015. It has to be exactly this version. CompuCell3D compilation will likely not work with other versions. Once you download and install Visual Studio 2015 you are ready to start compiling Developer Zone projects and develop your own CompuCell3D plugins and steppables in C++.

Setting up Linux computer for DeveloperZone compilation and developing new CC3D plugins and Steppables in C++

If you are using linux computer , most likely you do not need to do any compiler setup. CC3D on Linux comes prepackaged with all compilers and it does not matter if you installed CC3D using automated installer or installed directly using conda install command.

Setting up your Mac for DeveloperZone compilation and developing new CC3D plugins and Steppables in C++

Starting with CC3D 4.3.0 when you install CC3D it will come with most of the tools needed to compile C+++ plugins and steppables. The only thing that you need in addition to this is to install xcode-select package To install this from the terminal run the following:

xcode-select --install

This is it and you should be ready to compile custom plugins and steppables written in C++

Setting up your Mac for CC3D compilation via conda

Sometimes you may want to compile entire CC3D C++ code using conda build system. In general when compiling code via conda-build system you do not need to install anything - besides manking sure that your conda-build system works properly. To ensure that conda build system works properly from your base conda environment ( it is important that this is base environment or else things may not work properly) run

conda install conda-build

This will install all utilities you need to build CC3D. Tools like swig, cmake, compilers etc will be downloaded and installed automatically just in time for compilation. We will only mention that Current version of CC3D uses clang compilers version 12. On Linux we use gcc compilers and on Windwos Visual Studio 2015 Community Version (free)

To compile CC3D on your Mac using conda-build system follow this procedure:

  1. Install xcode-select - see above

  2. install miniconda3 with Python 3.7 - https://repo.anaconda.com/miniconda/Miniconda3-py37_4.11.0-MacOSX-x86_64.sh .

Once you install miniconda in the base environment of newly installed miniconda install conda-build package

conda install conda-build

3. Get MacOS SDK 10.10 - https://github.com/phracker/MacOSX-SDKs or directly from https://github.com/phracker/MacOSX-SDKs/releases. Here is direct link to the actual compressed folder: https://github.com/phracker/MacOSX-SDKs/releases/download/11.3/MacOSX10.10.sdk.tar.xz Once you unpack move the content to /opt folder of your Mac. You need to be admin to do this. You should be able to see the following folder /opt/MacOSX10.10.sdk after the copy is complete

  1. Clone CC3D repository

git clone https://github.com/CompuCell3D/CompuCell3D.git

  1. Go to CC3D repository’s conda-recipes folder:

cd <CC3D repository dir>/conda=recipe

  1. Start compilation by typing

conda build . -c conda-forge -c compucell3d

After a while you should have CC3D conda package ready