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It's hard to automate testing for graphics programming, most of the times you are looking for something that looks nice or good and you are forced to rely on just eyeballing it. Worse, you might need an artist to take a look at it, since programmer art is a fickle thing. There are some things that you can automate though and the fact that the computer is a cool analytic machine that has no concept of what looks good or bad is actually working to our advantage.

How do you use perforce? Some like to stuff as much as possible in the repository, in the hopes that it will be useful to have it all in one place. Others like to keep it minimalistic as to not bog down the server too much. I've already written a little bit about the things that might be good to consider setting up a perforce server, but once it's up and running you might want to have a look at how you are using it.

I'm a big fan of continuous integration, small checkins and very quick checkins. It's easier to debug afterwards and trying to puzzle together from perforce history afterwards is much easier when the changes are small and atomic. Now, that's what I like to do. Sometimes things don't really work out in the real world like you want it to so the other day I found myself with the fun situation of having two weeks worth of changes to try to integrate back into the main line. Of course nothing was backed up, nor did I feel particularly worried about it at the time. I had however done a lot of work, some of the changes involved the fruits of heavy thinking and other changes were the result of an hour or two of menial changes to the code that was a result of some other change.

For a couple of years now I've been using a system to manage visual studio projects and solutions automatically. It started out as a massive upgrade operation moving from visual studio 6 to 2002 at the time. In order to do this I decided to also generate all the projects automatically since it was such a pain to maintain them manually. I also didn't trust the settings in the current projects since they were all different from project to project. So I decided to move ahead and write these scripts to handle all the generation for me. Something wonderful happens when you can add files to your project and even projects to your solution with minimal work. It eases the pain to add things in their proper place, instead of just adding functions in some unrelated files (have you stumbled upon filename manipulation routines deep inside your AI?) you can take the trouble now to add the files to the project with proper names. You can also easily add new projects to keep separation into libraries sane.

Sometimes you wind up with changes in your source control system that shouldn't be in there, or you hit the submit button in perforce when you really meant just update the description. Anyways, you find yourself with a changelist that you want to roll back...

I've got this dual monitor setup at home, a widescreen monitor and a standard aspect monitor rotated 90 degrees. Every now and then I'd like to change my desktop background and I have quite an extensive collection of images that I've taken that I'd like to rotate around. So how do you do it?

A couple of days ago, Noel emailed me about the source to NiftyPerforce since he wanted to make some changes to it. At this point I only had it on my local subversion repository. I'd heard about this cool feature google recently put up, which should be interesting place to actually host a "real" project...

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...

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.

I remember back in the day when I started programming C++ on the IBM computer there were a plethora of compilers out there. Borland Turbo C++, Visual Studio, djgpp and my favourite Watcom C++. Watcom was my favourite because it's optimizer and it's powerful inline assembly features allowing you to specify exactly where arguments were passed in registers and dirty registers. The debugger was also good (at least in my memory). We used a freeware extender for flat mode instead of the one supplied with Watcom (which you had to pay money for).