Installing PhyreEngine and the PSVita and PS3 SDKs

This year we have the amazing opportunity to use PhyreEngine and develop a game for the Playstation 3. This is the first of many posts relating to the development of our game. One of the first challenges we faced was installing the engine, in this post I will describe the process with detail.

Installing PhyreEngine is rather straight forward, but it took quite a bit of figuring out get right. In this post I will outline all the steps required to get PhyreEngine 3.4 up and running and deploying samples to the PS Vita and PS3.

Before we start, I want to throw in a bit of a disclaimer and mention that I realize that some of these steps may seem redundant but I wanted to ensure that each one of my team mates and I had the exact same setups. So if you do choose to use this guide just know that this is what worked for me and my teammates on our machines.

This setup assumes Visual Studio 2010 is already installed, it will cover installation of Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack One, the Windows SDK (which was a bit of a pain), the DirectX SDK, the CGToolKit and finally, PhyreEngine itself. Once we have PhyreEngine up and running some samples, we will then install the PSVita and PS3 SDKs and get the samples running on those platforms.

Step One: Setting up the requirements for PhyreEngine

a)    If you do not already have it, download and install Visual Studio 2010 SP1:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=23691

b)    Uninstall the following if you have it installed (don’t worry, we’ll reinstall them later):

                              I.        Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 x64 Designtime

                            II.        Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 x64 Redistributable

                           III.        Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 x64 Runtime

                          IV.        Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 x86 Redistributable

                           V.        Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 x86 Runtime

c)    Install the Windows SDK (the reason why we uninstalled the above)

                              I.        Download the Windows SDK:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=8279

                            II.        Make sure you uncheck Visual C++ Compilers and Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 (important!)

                           III.        Download and install this Windows SDK patch:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=4422

d)    Download and reinstall the Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Packages (click repair if it says you already have it)

                              I.        x86: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5555

                            II.        x64: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=14632

e)    Download and Install the DirectX SDK:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=6812

f)     Download and install the CGToolKit
https://developer.nvidia.com/cg-toolkit-download

Step Two: Installing PhyreEngine

a)    Extract PhyreEngine zip to HDD root

b)    Run PhyreInstaller.exe

Its that simple! At this point PhyreEngine should be up and running for the Windows platform. You may be wondering why I told you to uninstall all those Microsoft Visual C++ files, only to have you reinstall them later. The reason for this is that I was having issues getting the Windows SDK to install successfully and found that uninstalling these files solved the problem. To set up PhyreEngine for the PS3 and PS Vita platforms you must do the following:

Step Three: Installing PSVita SDK

Step Four: Installing the PS3 SDK

Both SDKs have similar installers and the instructions to install them are the exact same. When you first run the installers, you will be greeted with a screen asking you to choose a path. This screen is not your install path, but is just a path where the installer will extract files to. I believe you may safely delete the path after installation of the SDK (I haven’t noticed any problems).

Once the files are extracted, you will be asked to select which features you want as well as your install directory. We just chose to install everything and used the default directories chosen by the installers should be fine. Now a little note about the install directory, technically you could install it anywhere, but I wouldn’t recommend that, unless you are big on tinkering with environment variables and Visual Studio project properties. The PhyreEngine documentation has a list of environment variables and “sample” values for the variables; however I found that there were some issues with parts of the engine if the environment variables weren’t set to the exact same values in the table. I would post the table here but I do not think I am allowed to, if you have PhyreEngine this table can be found in the getting started document. Now you should be able to build PhyreEngine projects for Windows, PSVita and PS3. Note that the Playstation platforms have a bunch of tools you may want to install  (ie. PSVita Debugger, PS3 Target Manager etc.), these tools aren't required but may make your life easier.

Anyways, that’s all for now. Now you know how to install PhyreEngine! If you have any problems you can Tweet me at @MikeGameDev and I’ll try my best to help you out.