Ahem.

I’m rather used to Subversion as my source control system of choice. I use the very nice http://xp-dev.com/ for hosting of engine code, for example, and I have a few other SVN servers for hosting my own personal projects.

However, SVN breaks down a bit with branching.. branches can get messy.. and it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve managed to kill a repository with a branch that just hasn’t gone in properly. From looking around my backup drives to clean them up the past few months, I’ve spotted a pattern I used to get around this - multiple local copies all over the place from different revisions, named with different experiments I was trying. Obviously this isn’t clean in the slightest, and it’s also rather confusing as to what the latest version actually is.. as I’ve counted twelve variants of SGZEngine all with slightly different bits and pieces, and some cleaner than others. This is a problem…

Enter the distributed version control systems!

There are two major ones that get touted about a fair bit these days - Mercurial and Git. My self imposed challenge for the next two weeks will be to have a look at Git and try get my head round it to start pushing stuff over, as it means I can branch out my little experiments much easier and tag them all properly, without losing information on what they are.. and anything important or fun, can be committed back onto the server.

The following two weeks will be Mercurial, and I should hopefully have a favourite at the end of the month.

Or I suppose, I could always go back to CVS…

I took part in Ludum Dare 21 last weekend.

I didn’t get anything submitted in time due to reasons I’ve already gibbered about over on their blog: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/08/23/thieving-fingers-post-mortem/ but it was a good experience nevertheless.

It showed that my engine is in need of a lot of work, and that my highly prized *cough* resource manager that I had spammed about last time was as much use as a heap of molten slag. It’s far too basic. Now, that’s basic in the sense that it does very little to protect yourself from grabbing a chainsaw, and attempting to use it to trim your nails. It’s powerful, yes, but you’re likely going to lose a finger or two. And for heaven’s sake, don’t sneeze!

So yes, engine needs more work, I think… the resource manager is probably fine as it is, it just needs some layering on top of it to make it less dangerous to use. I also need a hashed string implementation, rather than relying on unsigned ints everywhere, which become a total pain to manage.

However, 599 other people managed to submit something! That’s quite an achievement - and while I’m still slightly bitter about my laptop, in that I could’ve been number 600, I’m somewhat glad I didn’t get anything submitted in time, as there’d be no way I’d have much of a chance of rating much of that at all! And that would be bad to all the work people have put into them.

Doing games in 48-72 hours isn’t easy, but it’s really rewarding - you get so much freedom to do whatever you want that you just can’t get in a work environment. Ironically, it’s a good stress reliever for me, as after pounding at system bugs and platform issues for however long I have been, to be able to take a step back and chuck something together in a random weekend “FOR TEH LAWLS” is rather nice. And while I technically could do that every weekend, since when have I ever been that organized? ;)

Anyway, hopefully they do the same October challenge as they did last year, as I’d be keen to enter that - well as the next Ludum Dare around December-time.

Perhaps I’ll even have an engine that isn’t full of bugs for once!

Well, it seems the spambots are barking at the door again! so I’ve upped the anti-spam stuff a bit.

I’ve also opened registrations, so that if you do genuinely want to post comments and things, you can register and not be annoyed by the anti-spam bits and bobs ( well, short of the one on the login form! )

Anyway, to fill out the post a bit, I’ve been working on GLESGAE recently, and finally pushed in a Resource Manager. Now I can care not about deleting things, as the system will do it for me, hurrah! Well, to a point! I still need to delete the groups and banks they sit in when I’m finished with them, but that’s the job of a State destructor - and the State System is next!

I’m somewhat aiming to attempt Ludum Dare this weekend.. we shall see on how much spare time I have nearer the end of the week. It’ll also be the testing grounds for GLESGAE in it’s current state, which’ll be fun as there’s still a fair bit to do on it, including but not limited to:

1. State System
2. Entities
3. Memory Management
4. Logging ( the few printfs that have sneaked in don’t count! ;) )
5. Sound
6. Windows Support ( this is probably rather needed as most people use Windows. I, however, am not most people ;) )

There’s other things I want in GLESGAE but they’ll be done in due course.

Right, back to work!