September 2006 Archives

Visual Studio is the tool that most games programmers come to use for their day to day work. Perforce also seems to spread amongst games companies as the SCM system of choice. On paper Visual Studio also have source control integration. Great, now everything just happens automagically! No need to think about those mundane issues, I can just concentrate on the code. Well, that's wrong. You do need to concentrate on the "mundane" issues. One of the things that annoys me to no end is the fact that when you have the SCM feature enabled the time it takes to open a solution...

Ever after the radioactive TDD bug bit me and I'm now infected with that mode of development I've become more and more interested in good unittest frameworks to help me develop bugfree code fast. If you have not yet experienced Test Driven Development, I'd recommend reading up a little bit on it before continuing with this article, see the resources at the end of the page. One thing that still is lacking is a good solid unittest framework for shader development...

One of the annoying things about perforce is the need to be connected to the perforce server at all times. Manipulating files underneath perforce is a recipe for a world of hurt and pain. But there are times when you want to do just this, say you're on a trip with your laptop and of course there's not WiFi hotspot where you are just now, but you still want to code something and later on check it in.