Microsoft Visual Studio Refactor
As of Git Hash: cacd98d, rAthena has removed support for MSVS 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2015 solution and projects and introduced an improved MSVS 2013 solution.
Details:
MSVS 2008, 2010, and 2012 have been removed because their support from Microsoft has ended. We are sorry for the inconvenience and we understand these tools are fairly large for people to have to acquire again but this refactor has laid a foundation for the future development of rAthena!
For people who download MSVS 2017, think of this as a long term investment as this version will be supported for quite a few more years from Microsoft and the solution is easily adaptable to any newer version to come!
MSVS 2013 was chosen as the default because it is the first release from Microsoft as a free community tool as well as support for C++ 11 (for future work on the C++ branch).
Support for MSVS 2015 and 2017 still exists. Simply open the rAthena Solution and select Ok when it prompts about upgrading the solution files.
Each component (char, login, map, etc.) now has their own project file.
Removed redundancy by creating a core (common) project file.
Added true x64 build support for Windows operating systems.
Process of migrating your customized codebase should be effortless. If there are additional custom source files added, you can add them to the new solution easily.
Migrating from earlier versions of Visual Studio:
If you were using old versions of Visual Studio, we recommend you to use Visual Studio 2017 which requires only about 6 GB of disk space with only necessary components for building rAthena installed while older versions, i.e, Visual Studio 2012 requires about 10GB. VS2017 also loads faster than its ancestors 2013, 2015.
Thanks to @Sirius_Black, @Secrets, and @Lemongrass for their work on this!