Installation

Downloading SLADE

SLADE can be downloaded from the official site (official builds) or from the DRD Team SVN site (development builds).

Note that the current official release (3.0.2) requires the Microsoft VS 2010 Redistributable package to be installed, otherwise you will get a missing DLL error upon starting SLADE.

Installing SLADE

All that is needed is to extract the files from the downloaded archive in a directory. An archiver such as 7-Zip can do this task.
A SLADE directory should contain the following files:

• SLADE.exe
• SLADE.pdb (optional, separate download)
• slade.pk3
• FreeImage.dll (windows only)
• libfluidsynth.dll (windows only)
• libsndfile-1.dll
• openal32.dll
• portable (optional)
• slade3.log

If a file named portable is found in the SLADE directory, SLADE will work as a portable application and will create and store its configuration folders in the same directory. Otherwise, it will create and store them in the system-provided user directory (typically, C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Slade3 in a Windows Vista, 7 or 8 system). The content of the file does not actually matter; its existence is all that is needed.

SLADE.pdb is only used to generate the stack trace when SLADE crashes. If the file is not present, the crash report will not contain useful data. In normal circumstances, it is not needed.

FreeImage.dll is a library created by the FreeImage project used to handle most standard graphic formats (BMP, JPG, TGA, GIF, PCX, etc.). Different versions of this library exist, and they are not all compatible with SLADE: older versions may lack a needed function, newer versions may have altered previous behavior. For instance, SLumpEd uses an older version of FreeImage and both cannot be placed in the same directory as a result. For this reason, an appropriate version of FreeImage.dll is included in a SLADE3 download.

slade3.log contains a log of all console message, as well as a copy of the crash report, if any.

SLADE.pk3 is a zip file which contains the resources and definitions needed by SLADE to function properly. When run for the first time, SLADE3 will generate two directories, named config and palettes. They mirror the organization of slade.pk3 and allow users to add more content without having to modify this file.