Cities in the Sky

It’s not just an experiment in software engineering, I promise. I’ve done the last of what I needed to do now - finished up unit test integration with a couple of extensions to UnitTest++, re-wrote the build script to allow debug and release builds to be called in the same ant invocation (which has unfortunately shown me just how ugly XML can get when used for conditional logic…), and a load of other minor tweaks and fiddles to get things running as smooth or smoother than they were before in terms of day-to-day development.

I also spent a good long while upgrading this website’s Wordpress installation and playing around with the wp-cache plugin, as I’ve noticed it takes a stupidly long time to load most of the time. This broke everything though so I’ve now uninstalled it. Perhaps I’ll just change hosts once my two year stint with StreamlineNet is up. It took a fair while to do all this since at the same time I was trying to get a local mirror of the site set up on my file server, to allow me to cock around with a local copy and upload changes once I’m happy with them. Again this didn’t work out too well, but since it’s not so important I was clever and gave up.

So, now I’m all set to make some tangible progress with CITS. Trac is telling me people are important. It probably knows best. Then again, it’s telling me I’m 55% done so perhaps it doesn’t.

Okay, so I lied. I haven’t actually done any more on the game, I’ve worked on the build tools and server some more instead. I do have a reason though: the in-house tools we use at work are terrible, and I like to think that if I put together my own stuff in a spiffy enough way we can swap over to doing things my way instead!

Since I’m feeling guilty about not having any new screenshots, here’s one of my Trac roadmap page, showing a lovely progress bar for each version of the game. I shan’t show you the tickets page lest I give away too many tasty secrets!

Here’s a slightly more tasty shot showing my Pulse project overview. This makes me happy. Things to note are that there are lots of green bars (I like green bars), and that the recent builds (tied to checkins, or versions) have numbers of tests next to them, which will be increasing rapidly! You can also spy a couple of commit messages at the bottom, indicating that I have indeed been farting around with build-related stuff recently. There are a few nice graphs showing changing build times, numbers of tests and so on, but two non-game related screenshots are enough for now!

You’ll probably also notice the ‘Deluge’ and ‘Fuppes’ bookmarks in the browser too - I’ve been spending a little time pimping out my file server with some nifty toys. It’s now got bittorrent running as a service, with a web UI, which is very nice. Also I’ve been wanting to stream video to my 360 for a while now, but I don’t want to have a Windows PC turned on solely to grab stuff from the Linux file server and forward it on, so I set up Fuppes to do this. It’s all a bit complicated (as is Deluge, what with compiling from source), but very configurable and after a lot of tweaking does exactly what I want. All in all I’m actually quite liking doing things like this in Linux-land, the way it does a lot of things is very sensible, and I think Windows could learn a lot from it.