How do you work?
by Sangwoo Hong · in Technical Issues · 10/10/2004 (12:16 pm) · 2 replies
Hi. I'm a recent licensee who's pretty much done with the "substitute what's already there and see what happens" phase to the "let's change what's under the hood" phase of learning about TGE.
I feel I am ready to get down to doing some real work but I would like to hear about different people's approaches to how they setup and manage their projects before I decide how I should go about working on my own project.
All advice is of course welcome but I should mention that I am particularly interested in workflow issues like keeping up with the sdk, setting up VC++ 6 project files to compile alternate versions of the engine, .cc files I edited resideing in a file structure of its own away from the .cc files in the sdk, and such other not so fashionable but very mission critical issues.
Currently I am thinking about replicating an empty project file structure, copying the default .dsw file over to it, and editing it so it looks for .cc files first in the new file structure then goes looking for them in the sdk file structure. My hope in this case being that I'll know what files I changed since they live in their own file structure but the sdk can be kept up to date by checking out the head files to the untouched source code area. I would then diff the files in my project directory with their counterparts in the sdk directory so I can find out what if anything was changed since the last update and merge the change in.
Did that sound reasonable? I would love to hear how I'm completely out of my mind and how else I should go about setting things up. Come on everybody! Fire away!
I feel I am ready to get down to doing some real work but I would like to hear about different people's approaches to how they setup and manage their projects before I decide how I should go about working on my own project.
All advice is of course welcome but I should mention that I am particularly interested in workflow issues like keeping up with the sdk, setting up VC++ 6 project files to compile alternate versions of the engine, .cc files I edited resideing in a file structure of its own away from the .cc files in the sdk, and such other not so fashionable but very mission critical issues.
Currently I am thinking about replicating an empty project file structure, copying the default .dsw file over to it, and editing it so it looks for .cc files first in the new file structure then goes looking for them in the sdk file structure. My hope in this case being that I'll know what files I changed since they live in their own file structure but the sdk can be kept up to date by checking out the head files to the untouched source code area. I would then diff the files in my project directory with their counterparts in the sdk directory so I can find out what if anything was changed since the last update and merge the change in.
Did that sound reasonable? I would love to hear how I'm completely out of my mind and how else I should go about setting things up. Come on everybody! Fire away!
#2
How much of the work would you say was in torque script and how much was in C++? Did you have to touch the engine files much? If so how was the project set up? Did you recompile to a new executable or overwrite the existing executable in the torque directory?
Also, did you have to do any extra work afterwards to isolate your game from the rest of the sdk in order to clean it up in to shippable shape? Just trying to preempt any unnecessary work I made end up with just because I didn't know any better...
10/10/2004 (1:08 pm)
Thanks for the input PD. I'd like to ask a few questions if you don't mind...How much of the work would you say was in torque script and how much was in C++? Did you have to touch the engine files much? If so how was the project set up? Did you recompile to a new executable or overwrite the existing executable in the torque directory?
Also, did you have to do any extra work afterwards to isolate your game from the rest of the sdk in order to clean it up in to shippable shape? Just trying to preempt any unnecessary work I made end up with just because I didn't know any better...
Torque Owner Peter Dwyer
Get a good idea of the kind of game you want to do and start planning out what you need to do to make it a reality.
Don't start out with a MMORPG or anything like that. Such games take teams of programmers years to create.
I started out by doing a design and then when coding it up I started coding from the user interface downwards. I did this because the user interface is the first and last thing the user sees, so it was important to ensure that this worked. I worked out a three click rule (nothing in the game should take more than 3 clicks to get to). Next came game logic, level design, then the main character and finally post production i.e. particle effects, sound etc.
hope this helps