Compiling StepMania macOS

Compiling from Source on macOS

setup

First, install Homebrew by following the instructions on the Homebrew homepage.

Once it's installed, use Homebrew to install cmake and yasm.

brew install cmake yasm

If your version of macOS is recent, you'll already have git installed. You can check using

which git

which will return a path to where git is located on your computer if it's available, or git not found if not.

If you don't have git installed, use Homebrew to do so now.

brew install git

clone StepMania from GitHub

Use git's command-line interface to clone StepMania from GitHub.

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/stepmania/stepmania.git

When that has completed, cd into your local copy of the repository and initialize your local project's submodules.

cd stepmania
git submodule update --init

use cmake to generate build files

Next, cd into your Build folder and use cmake to generate a makefile.

cd Build
cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release .. && cmake  ..

If you have been designated as the macOS developer to build a formal, major release for distribution purposes, you can use the WITH_FULL_RELEASE flag. This will remove any git hash from the StepMania version number in the resulting executable.

cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" -DWITH_FULL_RELEASE=ON -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release .. && cmake  ..

build

Finally, build StepMania.

You can use the -j flag to compile more quickly by using multiple simultaneous build jobs. The number of build jobs should not exceed 2x your CPU cores. So if you have 4 cores, you can use -j8. If you have 2 cores, you can use -j4.

make -j8

allow Input Monitoring

⚠️ Note: For macOS 10.15 ("Catalina") and newer, you'll need to explicitly grant StepMania Input Monitoring permissions in System Preferences for input to be recognized.

Add StepMania to the list of permitted applications in: System Preferences → Security & Privacy → Input Monitoring

You'll need to remove StepMania from this list and re-add it every time you rebuild from source.