Building Celestia 1.6.x on Windows

Prerequisites

• Visual Studio 2022 (or 2017/2019) with the C++ workload
• vcpkg – install it somewhere, e.g. C:\vcpkg

1. Install vcpkg

git clone https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg C:\vcpkg
C:\vcpkg\bootstrap-vcpkg.bat

2. Install dependencies via vcpkg

C:\vcpkg\vcpkg --triplet=x64-windows install libpng libjpeg-turbo gettext[tools] luajit cspice
C:\vcpkg\vcpkg integrate install

vcpkg integrate install makes Visual Studio find vcpkg packages automatically.

3. Open and build the solution

1. Open windows/celestia.sln in Visual Studio
2. Set configuration to Release / x64
3. Build → Build Solution (Ctrl+Shift+B)

The output exe will be at:

windows/Release/Celestia.exe

4. Run it

Celestia expects its data files (stars, textures, etc.) in a specific layout next to the exe. The easiest way is to copy the built Celestia.exe into an existing Celestia 1.6.x installation folder (from the official installer), replacing the exe there.