Command & Conquer™ Remastered Collection: How to Open the Source Code and Build in Visual Studio

You’ll need the following installers to do this:

• The Windows 8.1 SDK from the Earlier releases section of the Windows SDK Archive[developer.microsoft.com]
• Visual Studio 2019 Community from the Visual Studio website[visualstudio.microsoft.com]

Now that you’ve got your downloads, it’s time to install Visual Studio! Note that Visual Studio Code will not work for this, as you need to build the .dll files once you make changes, so you need the full Visual Studio install.

Make sure to select the following components:

• MSVC v141 – VS 2017 C++ x64/x86 build tools (v14.16)
• C++ ATL for v141 build tools (x86 & x64)
• C++ MFC for v141 build tools (x64 & x64)

There are many other options and you can look through them all at your leisure during this step as well.

For the Windows 8.1 SDK, simply run sdksetup.exe and go through the whole setup process. You can untick all options except for the Windows 8.1 SDK itself.

Now that everything is there, you can safely open the CnCRemastered.sln file located in SOURCECODE within your game installation, or obtain the code from the CnC Remastered Github[github.com].

Once you have the solution loaded, if it asks to retarget the project, simply close that window without doing so. This is now the time to make your changes!

Once it’s finished and you want to build, press CTRL+B or right-click the project you are working on (either TiberianDawn or RedAlert) and click Build. You can find your built files in (Game install)/SOURCECODE/bin/Win32.