Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
readily available in the source code repository. Just try to build something 10 or 12 years old, and you
ll
see what I mean. If anyone out there has a good copy of Turbo Pascal and IBM DOS 3.3, let me know!
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The build machine should be extremely fast, have loads of RAM, and have a high
performance hard disk, preferably multiple hard disks with high RPM and configured
with at least RAID 0 for ultimate speed. Compiling is RAM- and hard-disk
intensive,
so try to get the penny-pinchers to buy a nice system. If you ever used the argument
about how much money your company could save by buying fast computers for the
programmers, imagine how easy it would be to buy a nice build machine. The entire
test team might have to wait on a build. How much is that worth?
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Automated builds have been around as long as there have been makefiles and
command-line compilers. I admit that I
ve never been good at the cryptic syntax of
makefiles, which is one reason I put off automating builds. If you use Visual Studio,
you might consider using the prebuild or postbuild settings to run some custom
batch files or makefiles. I wouldn
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t, and here
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s why: You
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ll force your programmers
to run the build scripts every time they build. That
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s probably wasteful at best,
completely incorrect at worst.
Prebuild and postbuild steps should run batch files, makefiles, or other utilities that
are required every time the project is built. Build scripts tend to be a little different
and skew toward getting the build ready for the test department or burning to disc.
As an example, the build script will always grab the latest code from the source
repository and rebuild the entire project from scratch. If you forced your program-
mers to do that for every compile, they
d lynch you.
Batch files and makefiles are perfectly fine solutions for any build script you need.
You can also write great batch files or shell scripts, since Visual Studio builds can
be run from the command line. There are some better tools for those who like
GUIs, such as Visual Build Pro from Kinook Software (see Figure 4.5).
This tool is better than batch files or makefiles. The clean GUI helps you understand
and maintain a complicated build process with multiple tools and failure steps. The
build script is hierarchical, each group possibly taking different steps if a component
of the build fails. Visual Build also integrates cleanly with a wide variety of develop-
ment tools and source code repositories.
Every internal tool you create should have a command-line interface. Whether the
tool creates radiosity maps for your levels, calculates visibility sets, analyzes map
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