I took a look at it, and you do not deliver windows binaries, so I assume you are talking about the Linux binaries in my version.
As I already explained below, you launch the game via the metalheart_unix file in the root directory, which is a bash file. You need to make sure to have all necessary 32bit dependencies installed (yes, the game is compiled for 32bit). If all of this is set up, you can play the game without any issues. The game is the same as it was release on Desura in 2013 (before they went bankrupt and went offline).
The branch MetalHeart is based on is the first branch released in 2012. MetalHeart 2 uses another branch from April 2013.
Viewing post in Cube MetalHeart - Sauerbraten Extended comments
Yes; I do not know how to build windows binaries and all the online tutorials are out-of-date and do not match my situation. My version is made out of the first testing sauer, but the source code and packages are updated. I do not include exe(s) but if anyone wants to, and knows how, they can build one for themselves. If you had the source code in there, and it could build, I would not have said anything at all. Also, there are raspberry pi users out there and I have found that these games play pretty well on it once they have been built properly. Especially 32 bit.
You need Visual Studio to build them (the easiest way and how I do it). I am not sure this game would work out of the box because I tried to port it in 2017 to RPi, and it ran not well on my 3B Model (the vanilla Cube 2 version). I guess the best would be to port it to OpenGL ES first. I have unreleased ports somewhere, but as mentioned they perform horribly.
Yes, you can build EXE with VS Code, but that's a different animal 😅(and I don't know if it is easily possible to do on Linux. I never tried that, but you would need to do that using Wine I guess).
Normally you would use Visual Studio the full Windows only IDE (https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/) and do it this way with the compilers and libraries Microsoft delivers for Windows.
In Visual Studio Code you have two options. Use Microsoft's compilers which came with the big Visual Studio solution what actually doesn't make sense why you would use VS Code then or you use a Linux environment for Windows and use the GCC for Windows in it like Min-GW64 (https://www.mingw-w64.org/) or MSYS2 (https://www.msys2.org/). These GCC for Windows act like the versions on Linux, but compile to Windows EXE executables and instead of Linux ELF executables. I don't know if the makefiles in the source code are set up to compile to client binaries this way, but I know on Windows they compile the master server executable this way. Might be a bit fiddly to do it this way. In Visual Studio IDE it's just a simple "Build" click. Visual Studio IDE isn't lightweight. I guess the initial installation is around 14GB or more.