Building on Windows

Prerequisites

These build instructions require at least Windows 7. First of all, figure out whether your system is a 32-bit or a 64-bit system. You can use the guide at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/15056/windows-32-64-bit-faq. On a 64-bit system both 32-bit and 64-bit builds can be made, although 64-bit is preferred. Making a 64-bit build on a 32-bit system might be possible, but hasn't been tested.

Required Tools

Choose either 32-bit or 64-bit depending on your system and which build you want to make.

CMake: click either Windows win32-x86 Installer or Windows win64-x64 Installer

Link: https://cmake.org/download/
or run winget install cmake in the command line

Visual Studio: click Download Visual Studio → Community 2019 (earlier version starting from Community 2015 Update 3 might also work)

Link: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/

Vcpkg

Link: https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg

FreePascal: click Windows 32-bit, then download fpc-<version>-win32.exe (for 64-bit builds also download fpc-<version>.i386-win32.cross.x86_64-win64.exe)

Link: https://www.freepascal.org/download.html

Mercurial: pick one (TortoiseHg has a GUI and is more user-friendly)

TortoiseHg: Chose one based on your OS version

Link: https://tortoisehg.bitbucket.io/

Command-line mercurial

Link: http://mercurial.selenic.com/downloads/

Setup

Install CMake, but please ensure you select "Add CMake to the system PATH for all users", so you can run CMake directly from the command line.
Install FreePascal and if necessary the 64-bit cross-compiler plugin (the one with cross.x86_64-win64 in the file name).
Install Visual Studio, ensuring the Workloads → Desktop development with C++ and Language packs → English options are selected.
Install Vcpkg by following the instructions under Quick Start section on the project page. If you don't have Git, use the Clone or download → Download ZIP option and extract the ZIP file. Create VCPKG_ROOT environment variable pointing to the directory you've cloned/extracted it to.
Install TortoiseHg / Mercurial
Restart the computer
Download the Hedgewars source code:

Using TortoiseHg:

Right-click in any folder on your computer
Select Tortoise HG → Clone.
In the Source textbox, enter: https://hg.hedgewars.org/hedgewars/
Press "clone"

Using command-line Mercurial

Shift + Right-click in the folder where you want to download the source and select "Open Command Prompt Window Here" or "Open PowerShell? window here".
Type and execute (The initial clone of the repository will take a while): hg clone https://hg.hedgewars.org/hedgewars/ trunk

Navigate to the Vcpkg directory in the command line and build the necessary libraries (this will also take a while, especially for Qt). The command is:

For 32-bit builds: .\vcpkg.exe install sdl2 sdl2-image sdl2-ttf sdl2-mixer sdl2-net physfs openssl qt5-base qt5-tools ffmpeg
For 64-bit builds: .\vcpkg.exe install sdl2 sdl2-image sdl2-ttf sdl2-mixer sdl2-net physfs openssl qt5-base qt5-tools ffmpeg --triplet=x64-windows

Build Hedgewars

From the Start menu run either "x86 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2019" or "x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2019" (if you want Hedgewars to install to the default location in C:\Program Files , run it as administrator).
Navigate to <hedgewars_root>\tools where <hedgewars_root> is the directory where you cloned the repository source to.
Run build_vcpkg.bat script

After building, you can run Hedgewars from the installed location (default is C:\Program Files\hedgewars\hedgewars.exe )

Additional options

Check the top section of build_vcpkg.bat to change some of the build options.