Installing JSBSim

These are my notes on setting up JSBSim. I’m using JSBSim version 1.2.3 and Windows 11, but I’ll probably update this for Linux later.

Source code

Download and unzip https://github.com/JSBSim-Team/jsbsim/archive/refs/tags/v1.2.3.zip so that there’s a C:\jsbsim-1.2.3 folder.

Prerequisites

  • Windows 11
  • Visual Studio 2022 with C++ support
  • cmake v3

Build and install

Open a command prompt and run the following commands:

cd C:\jsbsim-1.2.3
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON -DUSE_SIMGEAR=OFF -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=../install
cmake --build . --config Release
cmake --install . --config Release

Notes

If there are warnings about Cython and/or CxxTest, these can be ignored (unless you want to build the Python module or want to run the test suite). For my purposes, I’m just using the JSBSim API in C++ apps. I’m setting an environment variable JSBSIMDIR to C:\jsbsim-1.2.3\install and using it in my CMakeLists.txt file.