esmini is designed to link all dependencies statically. Main reason is to have a all-inclusive library for easy integration either as a shared library/DLL (e.g. plugin in Unity, or S-function in Simulink) or statically linked into a native application.

Note: Nothing stops you from going with all dynamic linking, it’s just that provided build scripts are not prepared for it.

Building the dependencies from scratch would, in some cases, be both complicated and time consuming. Instead they are, by default, provided in compressed packages including needed headerfiles and prebuilt libraries. The packages are available for Win, Mac and Linux. For Windows and Linux they include Debug mode binaries, in addition to the Release variant. CMake scripts will download several pre-compiled 3rd party packages and 3D model resource files.

Default location for some of these resources is Google drive, and others Github as released packages. If there is an issue with Google drive packages, try switch to the backup location at Dropbox by changing the following line in EnvironmentSimulator/CMakeLists.txt:

set ( FILE_STORAGE "google" )
to
set ( FILE_STORAGE "dropbox" )

Links to all packages can be found in EnvironmentSimulator/CMakeLists.txt.

If you need to (re)build a 3rd party lib for some reason, e.g. for an yet unsupported system or need for a specific version, these build scripts might be a starting point:

or this script that builds all sumo and osg libs, combining a selection of the above ones:

scripts/generate_sumo_osg_libs.sh

Linux Ubuntu

Also, g++ version >= 5 is needed for c++14 code support.

Windows and Mac: Install the cmake application

Here follows a brief step-by-step guide for building, running and debugging esmini with Visual Studio Code on Linux (tested on Ubuntu).

Prerequisites: Visual Studio Code (VSCode) and the CMake Tools extension.

When linking esmini with software already dependent on Google protobuf there might be need for dynamic linking of shared protobuf library. This can be achieved by defining cmake symbol DYN_PROTOBUF as following example:

cmake .. -D DYN_PROTOBUF=True

Then build as usual. It will link with protobuf shared library instead of linking with a static library.

When running esmini, the protobuf shared library needs to be found. Set dynamic library path environment variable to the folder where the library is. Example:

Linux:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./externals/osi/v3.5.0_2/linux/lib-dyn

macOS:
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=./externals/osi/v3.5.0_2/linux/lib-dyn

Note:
In above example, v3.5.0_2 reflects a tag that might change, use the one available in your system by checking the supported tags for your release in ./support/cmake/common/version_mapping.cmake.

The external dependencies OSG, OSI, SUMO and implot are optional. Also the unit test suite is optional, in effect making the dependecy to googletest framework optional as well. All these options are simply controlled by the following cmake options:

So, for example, to cut dependency to OSG and SUMO, run:
cmake .. -D USE_OSG=False -D USE_SUMO=False

To disable OSG, SUMO, OSI and googletest, run:
cmake .. -D USE_OSG=False -D USE_SUMO=False -D USE_OSI=False -D USE_GTEST=False -D USE_IMPLOT=False

All options are enabled/True as default.

Note:
Disabling an external dependency will disable corresponding functionality. So, for example, disabling OSI means that no OSI data can be created by esmini. Disabling OSG means that esmini can’t visualize the scenario. However it can still run the scenario and create a .dat file, which can be played and visualized later in another esmini build in which OSG is enabled (even on another platform).

esmini slim can be compiled and executed in the MSYS2 environment. Try following steps:

First generate build configuration (see above)

Then it should work on all platform to build using cmake as follows:
cmake --build . --config Release --target install

Or you can go with platform specific ways of building:

Windows/Visual Studio

macOS

To generate a Xcode project file, run the initial cmake command as follows:
cmake -G Xcode ..

Then build as usual:
cmake --build . --config Release --target install

or using Xcode directly:
xcodebuild -scheme install -configuration Release build

or open the generated project file in Xcode, and build from there.

To create bundles (shared library container), do from esmini root folder:

Linux

Once cmake .. has created the build configuration, of course you can build by calling the gnu make applciation directly instead of going via cmake --build as described above.

This will build all projects, in four parallel jobs, and copy the binaries into a dedicated folder found by the demo batch scripts.

CentOS 7 has some limitations, e.g. old versions of C/C++ compiler toolkits and runtimes. So it’s not possible to link with provided 3rd party binary libraries targeting Ubuntu 18++. However, by disabling some featuers in esmini, e.g. OSI and SUMO, it can still be used for previewing scenarios.

VirtualBox image for Windows host here:
https://www.linuxvmimages.com/images/centos-7/

Follow steps below to build and run esmini on CentOS 7.