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From concept to final product

Josh

Entry posted by Josh ·

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I'm working on project creation, management, and publishing right now. This is necessary because it automates some steps that would otherwise be very time-consuming.

 

When you create a project, you can choose the language and the platforms you want it to run on:

blogentry-1-0-10379700-1354777079_thumb.png

 

You can switch between projects to reload all assets and change the working directory:

blogentry-1-0-23851800-1354776971_thumb.png

 

You can export a project into a zip file, give it to someone else, and they can easily import it back from the zip, and have it available in the editor on their own computer:

blogentry-1-0-42297100-1354777068_thumb.png

 

The final step is publishing, which I am still working on. On Windows, this will create a win32 installer program automatically for you, so you can export your game's installer straight from the editor! On Mac, this will create an Apple disk image (.dmg), which is the normal way Mac apps are distributed. On Android and iOS, this will copy all needed asset files to the mobile resource directories, and then give you the option to open Eclipse of Xcode. From there, you can compile the project and have it run on your mobile device right away.

 

It's interesting that the new art pipeline provides a visual interface to go from an idea to a finished game. I think this will increase the amount of games and projects that get shared in our community, and will generally make the new engine easier and more fun to work with.

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Canardia

Is there a possibility to have somekind of ../Common/*.cpp folder for common source files, so you don't have to copy the same source code into each different platform folder?

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DaDonik

I feared only LUA will have such "project managment" support. Nice to have that in C++, too!

I actually aggree with metatron (doesn't happen too often :D). It would make it somewhat easier for us C++ people to share libraries between projects.

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Rick

Have you thought about how this would interact with source control tools? Will there be no issues with the project setup you have?

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gamecreator

I like it! However, I'd love to have one more option. Once I've sent my friends the program and I work on the game for a few more days and want to send them my changes, I send them just the new assets and the exe. I don't need to send them all the other ones I've already sent. What would be really nice is to be able to zip files added/modified since a given date. Obviously, I have no problem doing this manually but just a thought.

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Josh

Have you thought about how this would interact with source control tools? Will there be no issues with the project setup you have?

Because we try to avoid complicated package schemes and just use the plain file system, it's easy to use SVN, GIT, or Mercurial to synchronize projects. Assets don't get packed into zipped packages until the final publishing step. We synchronize all our assets right now with an SVN server, across PC and Mac computers.

 

In the future I would like to add SVN and GIT support right in the editor.

 

Is there a possibility to have somekind of ../Common/*.cpp folder for common source files, so you don't have to copy the same source code into each different platform folder?
That's how it already works. All .cpp and .h files are shared in a "Source" folder. There's a couple of exceptions, but those are just platform-specific code files the user never has to look at or worry about.

 

Once you create your cross-platform project, you can just keep all your source code files in one folder, and add them to the Visual Studio, Xcode, and Eclipse project. It's the same way we develop Leadwerks itself.

 

It's also possible to add templates for new languages, and the editor will detect it and display it in the project creation wizard.

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ChrisMAN

I like it! However, I'd love to have one more option. Once I've sent my friends the program and I work on the game for a few more days and want to send them my changes, I send them just the new assets and the exe. I don't need to send them all the other ones I've already sent. What would be really nice is to be able to zip files added/modified since a given date. Obviously, I have no problem doing this manually but just a thought.

 

PhysicsFS is really good at this but it isn't cross platform yet :( just mac, linux, pc

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