Incredible
I recently saw this utility in action and I think it will change video game programming as we know it.
A constant complaint around the halls at work is, ?Fucking build takes forever!? I don?t pretend I know why that is, but I do know how much it affects our users. IncrediBuild looks like a really cool tool and in theory, works much like a renderfarm in that it spreads the build process over a pool of machines and sends the final product back to you in record time. From what I hear, the PS2 compatibility needs a bit of work, but the XBOX code is ready to go.
I?m curious what you Red Capers out there think of it?
Comments
There was a PC game team at SolWorks that SWORE by it. It seemed to be very solid.
Last time I looked into it, any kind of PS2 support was non-existent. I believe it's effect could be imitated with GNU's distcc.
Posted by: Paul | February 9, 2004 8:00 PM
It's on this Red Caper's radar for at least a year now. I'm just waiting for the PS2 support. As for the XBox stuff, when I have some time, I'll probably enlist the Black Goat to try it out.
Of course, since our team is composed of build-time fanatics, we actually don't really need the thing. I just timed it - a full rebuild of the game engine takes 1:20 on my machine. That's one MINUTE and twenty seconds. And we could easily reduce that further by not rebuilding subsystems that rarely change.
So, it definitely is a nice toy. But for game development, the major time issue *should* be in the art build - we need a parallel art conversion tool. Game engines are rather small systems, compared to large-scale software.
Posted by: groby | February 9, 2004 8:01 PM
We've been giving it an evaluation in the Tools group and it definitely rocks the casbah for our Win32 stuff. Haven't tried the X-Box. They have a survey on their site you can fill out and express interest in things like CodeWarrior support.
In any case, I hope we can go live with it but I don't know if it will happen because somehow others in the group blew a big chunk of our budget on five floating licenses of Understand C++, something I thought was neat but not $500 neat, and definitely not nearly $2 K neat.
Me and steve have been discussing the art build issue. We feel automated object caching is the answer - a repository that caches built art, and it is all done behind the scenes. That way only one unlucky shmuck pays the price when something changes.
Posted by: vince | February 9, 2004 10:08 PM
Yes, that's been floating around in my brain for a while, too. Now if you get a build machine to rebuild art whenever you get a checkin, nobody except the change originator pays the price.
Of course, dependency management is going to be hell....
Understand C++ comes back to the topic of C++ being hard. *Anything* that helps reading C++ sources is a big improvement. I'd (almost) give a limb if it had refactoring support...
Posted by: groby | February 10, 2004 7:52 AM
Maybe C++ is hard for you.
Oh, no I didn'! :)
In any case, there was a topic talking about refactoring support in IDEs over on the JoS forums not too long ago. I believe they were referring to IDEA and some other Java IDE. I haven't taken a look at how extensive or useful it is.
Posted by: vince | February 10, 2004 9:39 AM
C++ is a major PITA for me, yes. Debugging it *sucks*. And don't tell me it's different for anybody else. The fact that *everything* might have side effects is not exactly a positive thing when you're hunting a bug.
As for IDEA, it's an *amazing* tool. Most of Fowlers Refactorings have been automated in that thing. While "Extract Method" is certainly impressive, even a systemwide rename of a function is nothing to sneeze at.
I assume the second one is Eclipse, with so-so refactoring support. Still better than anything available for C++ :)
Posted by: groby | February 10, 2004 9:53 AM