Building Your Game - Game Coding Complete - page 119

data must make it onto the install image on one or more discs or on the network for
the test team. Frequently, these components don ' t come together without a fight. On
some teams, building the game is something of a black art, assigned to the most
senior code shamans. There is a much better and safer way, which you ' ll learn

shortly.
Ultima VIII had a build process that was truly insane. It went something like this:

1. Grab the latest source code: editor, game, and game scripts.
2. Build the game editor.
3. Run the game editor and execute a special command that nukes the local game
data files and grab the latest ones from the shared network drive.
4. Build the game.
5. Run the UNK compiler (Ultima s game scripting language) to compile and link

the game scripts for English. Don

'

' t ask me what UNK stands for, I really can ' t

.
6. Run the UNK compiler twice more and compile the French and German game
scripts.
7. Run the game and test it. Watch it break and loop back to Step 1 until the game
finally works.
8. Copy the game and all the game data into a Temp directory.
9. Compress the game data files.
10. Build the install program.
11. Copy the English, French, and German install images to 24 floppy disks.
12. Copy the CD-ROM image to the network. (The only CD burner was on the first
floor, and I worked on the third floor.)
13. Go to the first floor media lab and make three copies of each install: 72 floppy
disks and three CDs. And hope like hell there are enough floppy disks.

remember …

Before you ask, I ' ll just tell you that the fact that the build process for Ultima VIII
had 13 steps never sat very well with me. Each step generally failed at least twice
for some dumb reason, which made building Ultima VIII no less than a four-hour
process on a good day.

The build was actually fairly automated with batch files. The game editor even
accepted command-line parameters to perform the task of grabbing the latest map
and other game data. Even so, building Ultima VIII was so difficult and fraught

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