The weekend after Ludum Dare some of my plans fell through so I decided to work on a simple animation project, a major feature I had to cut from my project.  The project was simply joints and bones with simple interpolation between keyframes.  The editor, or lack of, consisted of 10 key frames and a stick man with 11 joints and 10 bones.

After getting the mouse to drag a joint it was clear I needed to make the editor smart enough to keep the joint dragged within the length of the bone as the bones would be growing/shrinking during the animation and messing stuff up.  After adding the limits, it was starting to act how I wanted; although I had to press digits 0 through 9 quickly to see the animation.

While writing the interpolation from frame X to frame Y I came across a bug where I was accounting for an offset I didn’t need to and it resulted in something surprising but cool; stickman into spaceship.

During the last several months or more I’ve started several projects, only to abandon them at, or soon after, blank screen.  Mike “PoV” Kasprzak made a blog post about using premake to create a project.  My process had been copy a template directory, with some basic code to get to blank screen, to where I want my new project, rename as needed – create the Visual Studio project and setup everything; include and library directories, debug working directory, post-build events, etc etc…  Two to three hours later I had a blank screen, and rarely had motivation to continue much further.

Enough with that.

I started playing with my “make.lua” premake script first, and my immediate impression was, ‘meh’.  But after an hour I realized the potential it had.  I copied my template directory and used premake to make the project.  During the process I realized it was powerful enough to set include/lib directories, and all the other tedious settings I previously had to do manually.  It also occurred to me that I could use a windows batch file “CreateProject.bat” to automate the process even more.

Quickly CreateProject.bat would copy the template directory to a new location, rename it to the project and call premake to create the project on the spot.  This wasn’t quite enough, I wanted it to build the project in both Debug and Release, and do some find/replace in files as needed for personal preference.  While talking about this automation project with Pekka “pekuja” Kujansuu “sed” was mentioned.  Sed is a stream editor on the unix platform which has find and replace capabilities.  With great help from Pekka and Mike, I was able to get it to do what I needed with renaming.

This all took several, eight to twelve, hours but the next, or any future, time I need to make a project, is is a matter of typing  “CreateProject MyNewProject” inside command-line and all the magic happens.  My final step will be to setup a script to add the project to a subversion repository, but that will be a few weeks or whenever I get around to it.  I am amazed at how rewarding this feels.

The files that do the magic are here, although probably needs quite a bit of work to generate a project that would be useful to your needs:

• CreateProject.bat – This is the main access point that gets the automation rolling.
• make.lua – This is used by premake to setup the solution and project as needed.
• build.bat – This is a small bat to build from command-line with VS2010.

Originally Posted around mid-July 2010:

During development programmers often have to make a choice between spending time making an editor or just programming away. Often they choose a middle ground, where objects can be manipulated in a horrible fashion which can in the worst cases be counter-productive. After finding many of my projects go down this road I’ve decided to make a framework to quickly create an editing environment for designers of the game. This gives the benefits of an intuitive Win32 interface, while giving full power to the programmer.

Currently three areas can be controlled by the developer using this framework. The Menu Bar is setup quickly by the developer calling MenuBar_AddItem(). The developer can also enable, disable, check or uncheck the menu options as well as change the name if they decide to later. A callback passes the ID of the item when it is clicked, and thus should be handled. The Status Bar is a nice touch allowing the developer to set the status of the application. If something is loading, or time consuming this can be updated to show the end-user what is going on. Finally the Edit Area allows for edit controls to be added. Currently controls can be added for: bool, float, int, uint and string although I have plans to add custom controls. The developer calls EditArea_AddItem() for each item they want. If the selected object/type changes they just clear it and add again. All tracking/updating is automatically handled by the editor framework, although I want to add callbacks to this area.