Technical Blog #0

[John]

Put most simply, a library needs to make my life easier, not harder.

Is it fully documented?
Is there a community of people already using it, with whom I can interact?
Does it scale up or does it fall over when stressed?
Is it cross-platform?
Is it easy to setup and get running?

If any of these questions have a negative answer, then that is a pretty major red flag. External libraries are only useful to the extent that they save you time and effort.

JW

Out of interest how did you choose your libraries? As an informatics researcher I'm curious how the real world makes decisions like this.

[John]

I haven't stress-tested mercurial with lots of binary blobs yet. If it gets out of hand, we can always purge the history and start fresh. In practice, I rarely have to go back and retrieve things from the history. It is often better to just init a new repo from the current state and start from there. You can leave the old repo on disk for consultation if the (rare) need for revision spelunking ever arises.

JW

Nice update, and welcome Victor.

The more technical the blogs, the better in my opinion.

I occasionally use Git on Windows, but it feels like a bit of a nasty hack compared to Mercurial, so I prefer to use that for all my personal projects. I have a couple of open source projects hosted on Google Code, a couple of private ones on bitbucket, and even more I just push/pull to my Dropbox folder.

We also use Mercurial at work, which is handy.

How do you find Mercurial stands up with large binary blobs? I've head that neither Git nor Mercurial handle them very well.

I've also used FMOD a little (a very little, and a old version too), and found it to be a very nice library to use.

I shall look forward to the next update.

[AndyG]

Great blog. Thank you for taking the time todo this. I am a software engineer and have been recently dabbling in game development on my own time. So it is really cool to "see" the real thing in action.

[liongordy]

John,
This kind of information describing your efforts in producing this game should help everyone to
understand the level of professionalism you 3 are diligently working toward. You are truly making rapid advances in the progression of the "Banner Saga". Thanks for sharing this and kudos to all.

[jaggers]

John -

*Highly* impressed that the first thing you do set up your CI/SCM infrastructure... it's unreal how much that accelerates development, especially if any of your team are distributed.

Your tools selection is pretty much best-of-breed, IMO, though be aware that Jenkins leaks like a mother; be prepared to kick the controlling node in the head periodically to recover that memory. And afterward, I strongly suggest running a manual build (I don't know why, but the way ours is set up, the first build after reboot has to be run by hand or is stays fffffed up for some reason).

Maybe that won't happen to you, but heads-up anyway!

I love this technical detail! It makes me want to drop the code I'm working on here and go work with the Stoic team

[John]

*Highly* impressed that the first thing you do set up your CI/SCM infrastructure... it's unreal how much that accelerates development, especially if any of your team are distributed.

Agreed, that really lubricates the whole development process moving forward.

[Clemer]

This project is beautiful, and I really dig the transparency y'all are exhibiting in posts like this. Keep up the awesome work.