These are some general notes on Cinder's implementation on the Microsoft Windows platform.
By default Cinder targets Windows 7 and later. This is dictated by the _WIN32_WINNT
macro, which is typically defined in your project's Preprocessor Definitions build setting. The value 0x0601
maps to Windows 7. To target a different version of Windows, you'll need to modify this variable in both your application and Cinder itself, and rebuild Cinder.
Cinder supports Visual Studio 2013 and 2015, including the free Community editions of both. As of this writing Cinder ships with only VC 2013 projects, but these can be used with 2015 without modification. Furthermore, the v140 toolset is fully supported, meaning you can optionally upgrade to the native 2015 toolset. If you do so, you'll want to make sure you've built Cinder with the same.
Visual C++ 2013 and 2015 have two toolsets (roughly, compilers) associated with them. For VC 2013 they are v120 and v120_xp. For VC 2015 they are v140 and v140_xp. The non-XP variants are able to target Windows Vista and later. In order to target Windows XP, you'll need to use one of the _xp compilers, in addition to setting _WIN32_WINNT=x0502
. Please note that this path is not officially supported, and in particular Cinder's built-in audio will not function. However for advanced users this can be made to work.
In addition to the normal Debug and Release build configurations, Cinder also ships with Debug_ANGLE and Release_ANGLE variants. ANGLE, which stands for Almost Native Graphics Library, is an implementation of OpenGL ES in terms of DirectX. This can be useful for supporting machines where OpenGL drivers can't be guaranteed or are of poorer quality than DirectX. TinderBox can setup your project to use ANGLE.