The Cortex Command Community Project is Free/Libre and Open Source under GNU AGPL v3

This is a community-driven effort to continue the development of Cortex Command.
Stay up to date in our Discord channel.

First you need to download the necessary files:

1. Install the necessary tools.
   You'll probably want Visual Studio Community Edition (build supports both 2017 and 2019 versions).
   You also need to have Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2017 (x86) installed in order to run the compiled builds.
   You may also want to check out the list of recommended Visual Studio plugins here.

2. Clone this Source Repository and the Data Repository in neighboring folders.
   Do Not change the folder names unless you want to make trouble for yourself.

3. Copy the following libraries from Cortex-Command-Community-Project-Source\external\lib\ into the Data Repository:

• lua51.dll
• fmod.dll
• liblz4.dll
• zlibwapi.dll

4. Copy Scenes.rte and Metagames.rte from your purchased copy of Cortex Command into the Data Repository.

Now you're ready to build and launch the game.
Simply open RTEA.sln with Visual Studio, choose your configuration, and run the project.

• Use Debug Full for debugging with all visual elements enabled (builds fast, runs very slow).
• Use Debug Minimal for debugging with all visual elements disabled (builds fast, runs slightly faster).
• Use Debug Release for a debugger-enabled release build (builds slow, runs almost as fast as Final).
• Use Final to build release executable.

The first build will take a while, but future ones should be quicker.

The Linux build uses the meson build system, and builds against system libraries

• g++>=8.1 (needs to support c++17 filesystem)
• allegro4
• loadpng
• flac
• luajit
• minizip
• lz4
• libpng
• libX11
• meson>=0.43
• boost>=1.55
• xorg-misc-fonts

1. Install Dependencies (see below for some distro-specific instructions).

2. Clone this Source Repository and the Data Respository

3. Open a terminal in the Source Repository.

4. meson builddir

5. cd builddir

For meson versions >=0.54 (check meson --version) :

6. meson compile for debug build, or meson compile CCCP for a release build.
   If the build fails because of memory shortage you may need to reduce the number of build threads (meson will use all available threads by default) using the -j<number of threads> option, if this doesn't help increase your swap size to at least 6Gb.

For meson versions <0.54

6. ninja for debug builds, or ninja CCCP.x86_64 for release builds.
   Using the -j<number of threads> option will also work here.

1. Copy (or link, might be preferable for testing builds) builddir/CCCP_debug.x86_64 or builddir/CCCP.x86_64 (depending on if you made a release build) into the Data Repository.

2. Copy Scenes.rte and Metagames.rte from your purchased copy of Cortex Command into Data Repository.

3. Run ./CCCP.x86_64 or ./CCCP_debug.x86_64 in the Data Repository.

Until borderless windows are implemented, you might seem get stuck in fullscreen mode.
Try Alt-Return, or if that doesn't work kill CC with ctrl-alt-end.

On X11 media keys and such don't work in fullscreen, this is a known issue (this does not happen on Wayland).

If you get errors similar to ALSA lib ... could not open slave, try adding:

option snd_mia index=0
option snd_intel_hda index=1

to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

Arch Linux: # pacman -S allegro4 flac luajit minizip lz4 libpng libx11 meson xorg-fonts-misc

Ubuntu: # apt-get install liballegro4-dev libloadpng4-dev libflac++-dev luajit-5.1-dev libminizip-dev liblz4-dev libpng++-dev libx11-dev meson

For more information and recommendations, see here.