Hello everybody! I'll jump straight to the point because I have a lot of questions I need help with, and I want to try and be as comprehensive as possible with them.
Context: I am using Visual Studio 2026 on Windows 11 (x64), with CMake for builds. I want to use Ogre as the rendering engine for a custom-built game engine, and as a consequence I'm looking to customize my build of Ogre as well.
Question No. 1: I am currently trying to build Ogre 14.5.2. The source file pulled from the github page comes with a few dependencies already included but several recommended dependencies listed in the tutorial on building are absent and others are out of date. Is there any particular way to download and include the latest versions of those in the build process itself, or is it fine to build them separately and simply direct to those existing libraries?
I'm still relatively new to using third-party libraries as a whole, and learning how to build from source has been a journey all on its own for me this past week. Trying to wrap my head around CMake and all of the different ways the libraries expect me to build things is tough and a lot of youtube tutorials are either focused on linux development or several years out of date with older versions of Ogre. This leads into my next question...
Question No. 2: Is Ogre 14.5.2 compatible with SDL3? The file comes with SDL2 included, and I figured it would be fine to replace it with SDL3 but I honestly have no clue how to actually do that correctly or if it will even work.
I attempted to follow the tutorial on building Ogre and got far enough with CMake to see that it detected SDL2 on the initial configuration, but it then recommended installing SDL2 after I changed the directory to where I had SDL3 installed. Once I tried to actually generate the file, it failed to do so.
Question No. 3: Should I still include the deprecated dependencies in my project? The CMake file suggested I get things like FreeImage and Cg, but the tutorial says they are deprecated.
So far I have downloaded, built, and installed the latest versions of pugixml, SDL3, zlib, freetype, DirectX/Windows SDK, Vulkan SDK, and assimp. I have not tried to download the deprecated dependencies because it's suggested that they won't be supported.
Question No. 4: This is perhaps my most noob-ish question yet, but I want to make sure I'm not screwing this up. In the tutorial, it says I can point OGRE_DEPENDENCIES_DIR to a folder with all of my middleware projects, which contains the bin, lib, and include folders with the appropriate filetypes in each. Is it acceptable for the directory to be something like "C:/Libraries" for example?
This would be where I've installed the other dependencies listed above. I'd like to make sure I don't need to combine ALL of them into a single folder with a single set of bin/lib/include folders, as opposed to the way they currently are with individual folders for each dependency.
Any help is greatly appreciated, and if you need any more info I'll be glad to share what I can. Thank you! 
