Pies
Allo!
Well, I figure I should probably get back into the swing of things now. I should probably also explain why I haven’t been in the swing of things too.
A month and a bit ago I thought it’d be a great idea to reformat my main computer to install a couple more operating systems and to clean out the crap that always seems to have accumulated in Windows after about half a year or so. It should have been dead straight-forward, but instead resulted in hair-pulling frustration and a lot of CDs in the bin. After several nearly-working installations of XP and Vista I discovered (through use of the helpful little tool memtest86+) that my RAM had somehow become broken, at the exact same time that my DVD drive broke. This wiped out about two weeks through experimenting, waiting for things to arrive, experimenting again, waiting for more things to arrive, and finally setting up four (yup) operating systems.
Then once I’d gotten my development environment all up and running with the latest versions of my dependencies (Ogre, UnitTest++ etc.) I found out that, in a nutshell, Ant is rubbish for C++ projects. I already suspected this since after making the build scripts work cross-platform they looked quite grotesque (XML doesn’t express logic well…), but the final nail in the coffin was the ridiculous bug that causes builds to continually slow down until they eventually stop. After asking on the project’s forum, I was directed to a patch written in 2003 that would fix it. Having to apply a patch from half a decade ago to get things back to their previous level of slowness is just stupid, so I spent a while setting up some different MSVC project files and rejigging the way CITS is built. That all took about a week (spare time only, remember).
Then the new version of Dwarf Fortress came out.
Then my lovely girlfriend and I went on holiday to Vienna for four days, which was nice.
Now we’re back though, and I’m ready to get on with things. Since in the plane I saw a lot of clouds and decided they were awesome, I may well go about revamping the sky a bit since it still looks rubbish to me. I know it’s not very important, but you guys have been deprived of screenshots for so long!
July 31st, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Get on with it boy! Enough of the pretty stuff already - we don’t want screen shots, we want a game!
How was Vienna by the way? Did you like it?
PS Stop wasting your life on that 16 colour ASCII art game!
July 31st, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Heya
Have you tried MSBuild at all for your files? It works cross-platform, thanks to Mono, and can do parallel builds to speed things up a bit. It too, however, uses XML for the build files (the .vcproj files). I’m getting into NAnt for my projects; I quite like it, although my needs are much simpler being happily stuck in the world of .NET!
There’s always SCons if you get stuck!
What did you think of Vienna? I went there for a week a couple of years ago with my ex and had a really good time. What did you see?
Alastair
July 31st, 2008 at 9:31 pm
PS: I had similar problems with my Linux box. I’ve been trying to set it up for XenServer (Citrix’s version of VMware Server) and have also suffered a few hardware problems - first the motherboard was dud and then the onboard NIC wasn’t recognised by XenServer! It’s a pretty sweet Phenom X4/4GB RAM machine now, though
August 3rd, 2008 at 11:28 am
Vienna was brill-tastic, we saw most of the important/impressive bits inside the Gürtel (Stephansdom, Rathaus, Hofburg, Peterskirche, all the museums… the Lonely Planet guide was pretty thorough!), had some pretty nice Austrian meals (schnitzels are lovely!), and had a great big walk up in the hills to some heurigens (though we ran out of cash so couldn’t afford a lot of wine…). We would have liked one more day to take a boat tour of the Danube really, but never mind!
I’ve looked at MSBuild, along with just about every other build system in existence! I came to the conclusion that none of them are quite what I want, but that Ant was probably the least awful. MSBuild seems to be like Ant, but not cross-platform (’platform’ as in Linux/Windows/Mac). SCons would be nearly ideal if it wasn’t so damn slow. I want to be able to hit ‘build’ and be done in less than a second if only one file has changed. SCons makes that more like 10 or 30 seconds.
Good to hear from you guys anyway
Hope you’re pootling along alright.