The Burger has arrived!
Community Forums/Showcase/The Burger has arrived!
| ||
| *ahem* I have just released the Buildmeister, a fully automated project deployment utility. The gist of it is that it takes your source code & media and spits out the final install versions of your project when you hit compile, which doesn't sound like much - but anyone who has worked with larger projects with frequent releases knows how much time this can save. You can check it out here. |
| ||
| Guys, you should really check this out. I've been looking forward to this for months! He's had me on the update for a while :). |
| ||
| I looked when he posted but couldn't find any screenshots on the site. No screenthots = no download |
| ||
| Your loss I guess - I considered putting screenshots on the page but opted against it. |
| ||
| It's not really a graphical app... why would you want screenshots? |
| ||
| looks swish, and uses python too :) |
| ||
| Concretly, what does it really do? I mean I'm not sure to see what's hard in hitting a "build" button. Especially in the case of blitz where there is no way to do incremental compiling, so compiling a project is really no more than compiling compiling the main source file. I don't wanna seem critical, I just really wonder what's the point of it. The only real use I could imagine is for multiple versions of the code, but for this a preprocessor (like yours :) ) is the choice, and for the deployment part any install utility has everything needed. OK, there can be some little annoying things, like modifying by hand the icon of your executable, and automating this would be good (and surely any shell script would do, no?) Can't I simply install Cygwin, run my favorite shell in it and have all the open source scripting languages at hand? I could even use good old DOS batch files. So it may have its use, but to me it looks a bit like using a bomb to kill a moskito. So really, the challenge now is to convince me, I'm all ears, and all ready to declare myself stupid if I missed something :) |
| ||
| Eek! Well, I spent about 10 minutes typing out the list of what the Buildmeister does to build Juno which I used to do by hand and then pressed the back button. Gah. I'm not typing that one out again. The answer simply is: You can install Cygwin, use your scripting languages and shell scripting to build stuff just like the Buildmeister. The key ingredient is time. Aside from the ease of use of the Buildmeister, the time it takes to set up a simple-ish project in it is but a few minutes, and, once setup, you just have to hit compile from then on in. If you don't need scripts to build your project you don't even have to know that they exist - the Buildmeister is designed that way. The Buildmeister isn't really just about building EXEs - that's the easy part! - it's about building EXEs, copying file lists, compiling versions and doing, by scripts, all of the tricky, project specific stuff in between. Juno requires me to set \media\data\cheats.dat to $010101010101 in the full version and \media\data\cheats.dat to $010202020202 in the full versions (that's one of three files that require changing per version build). I'll be buggered if I have to go back and do it by hand when building Juno again - it used to take me half an hour to build the two installs, and it takes just two minutes of zero user input for the Buildmeister to do it for me. That's why I wrote it - because it's extremely useful for me, and if it's extremely useful for me then I am sure others can find it to be that way too! I suggest you download it and try it out - it's not something you know you need until you have used it. |
| ||
| Well, I'll try it when I've got time. Frankly your example is not very convincing to me. I've not waited such a tool to automate boring building tasks. It can be done in so much ways already. Juno requires me to set \media\data\cheats.dat to $010101010101 ... Why not just have a folder per version, and put each file that is version dependant in the right folder; then your installation program (the best ones are free and scriptable) copies the right versions. It's so simple.I mentioned Cygwin because it's free and gives you so much alternatives, but TBH I don't really feel the need for it and have no problem setting up the right version for compiling. And it doesn't take me half an hour, far from it. Which is just the reason why I'm wondering if I'll find this so useful. I think it *is* useful, but when you say "which doesn't sound like much " I just say "indeed". I hope you don't mind me to publicly giving my point of view. If I change my mind I'll go back and let you know. |
| ||
| Oh, and if you *can* find out a concrete description for it that encompasses everything it does - I would love to hear it! |
| ||
| for my current project I can have upto 30 different exes for it, and probably more since I have a lot of little demo projects for different aspects of the library, and going through and changing or rebuilding them takes a long time in blitz, here I can just get buildmeister to automate it for me, which makes my life alot easier. so I give this program a BIG thumbs up. Good work here Michael. |
| ||
| Now *that's* the kind of projects where the Buildmeister really helps out! :) |
   |