Cities in the Sky

Honestly, I’m not dead, I’m just being quiet. I haven’t posted for a while because the Simul Weather evaluation ran out so I haven’t got anything pretty to post screenshots of!

I just thought I’d update you with some of the goings on, however uninteresting they may be to anyone but me.

Game-wise, I’ve been fixing up some bugs that have been around for a while. I finally got annoyed by them enough to kill them off. For example, previously you could only play the game once; if you chose ‘play’ from the menu a second time the game would crash. That’s because Ogre rather annoyingly requires you to give a unique string identifier to everything, and throws a wobbly if you use the same name twice. There are no other options. So I implemented the simplest and most effective solution I could think of: using the ‘this’ pointer converted to a string as the name.

Programming-wise I’ve been improving the quality of the code (I just got Effective C++ by Scott Meyers and it looks like there are one or two things I didn’t know!). I’ve also been writing some more unit tests, which has been surprisingly fun. I like seeing the number of tests slowly rising in Pulse. It’s like a little safety-ometer.

System-wise I’ve been investigating another build tool (partly because I need to for work, partly because I’m still unsatisfied with every other tool out there). I’ve always known Jam has been a good tool, but haven’t tried it myself since I know it’s unsupported and out-of-date. Recently though there was a discussion on the sweng-gamedev mailing list about resurrecting Jam, and one kind soul, Joshua Jensen, has started maintaining a modified version of Jam called JamPlus. I’ve tried it out a little and found it to be blazingly fast, and it scales excellently with the number of processors you have, which beats Visual Studio’s project-level parallelism hands-down. I’ll be seeing if I can write some Jam scripts for CITS soon.

Since JamPlus uses git for source control, I’ve also been investigating that, and it sounds pretty interesting. I can’t see it improving things for me since my project has only one author, but for larger teams it’d be great, and would solve a lot of the problems I’ve experienced at work (mostly due to the awkwardness of branching, and some terrible diff tools).

So, next on the agenda game-wise will be a new UI. That’s more than it sounds, as it’ll also make the current ‘menu’ (press ‘p’ to play…) and the highscore entry (you’re always Anonymous…) usable, as well as improving the in-game information display both in looks and functionality. Should be an interesting and worthwhile change, anyway.

Hmm. That’s a surprisingly large amount of text for such a small amount of information.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 9:46 pm and is filed under Cities in the Sky. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.