Makepanda: Couldn't find tool version of Visual Studio 2019

Compiling or Editing the Panda Source
1

I’m trying to build Panda3D on the Windows 10 development environment VM provided by Microsoft. However makepanda aborts early with the following error :

Couldn't find tool version of Visual Studio 2019.

I’m launching it with the following command :

 makepanda/makepanda.bat --everything --arch=amd64 --msvc-version=14.2 --windows-sdk=10 --no-eigen

The installed VS in the VM is Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2019 Version 16.6.3

Looking into the code, makepandacore.py tries to open a file named “VC\Auxiliary\Build\Microsoft.VCToolsVersion.default.txt” which doesn’t exist in the VM.

The content of this file is then used to define the vcdir_suffix “VC\Tools\MSVC\%s\”

This directory actually exists, C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.26.28801 so the only missing part is to retrieve 14.26.28801 from somewhere else ?

2

Ok, when manually creating the file, makepanda aborts a microsecond later, but this time with a more helpful message

  Couldn't find compilers in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.26.28801\bin\HostX64\x64.  You may need to install the Windows SDK 7.1 and the Visual C++ 2010 SP1 Compiler Update for Windows SDK 7.1.

And indeed, the C++ component is not installed by default int the development VM… After installing it the compilation starts happily :slight_smile: