Game Development Community

Build system

by Gerald Fishel · in Torque 3D Professional · 12/26/2012 (11:13 am) · 3 replies

So since GG has gone Open Source with T3D and it seems is heading that way with the whole product line, I'm wondering if the Steering Committee would consider moving Torque over to a more standardized build system, such as CMake. It would make things a whole lot easier to manage for multiple platforms, especially for adding new platforms, and will be more likely to be familiar to new developers working with Torque.
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Torque Owner Daniel Buckmaster
T3D Steering Committee
#1
12/26/2012 (3:11 pm)
There's been some discussion on CMake in this thread and on GitHub, particularly in this issue. Harley Laue has also started work on it, though I'm not sure how it's looking at the moment. I personally hope that whoever ends up doing this Linux port, if it gets funded, takes care of CMake project files as well. As great as the current project generator scripts are, they're proprietary (open-source, though) and nonstandard, and they really don't need to be.

EDIT: for reference.

Torque Owner Demolishun
DemolishunConsulting Rocks!
#2
12/26/2012 (3:34 pm)
I think there is a link to add requests like that so it gets more visibility. It is where everyone went and voted for features that were suggested by the community. This sounds like a good idea, it is just going to be some work to implement.

Is this something that could exist in parallel to the current build system? That way it could be phased in?

Torque Owner Gerald Fishel
Development Ninja
#3
12/26/2012 (5:54 pm)
I'm using CMake now for my copy of T3D. It's really not that hard to implement it, and it wouldn't interfere with the existing build system, except for the potential for conflicts if attempting to build different projects with both systems within the same directory tree, which I think might be a little silly.

Just to give an idea of what's involved, the entire set of CMakeLists.txt files I use to build for Windows is around 10kb, and it works for generating projects for Visual Studio 2008/2010/2012, MinGW and makefiles for NMake, out of the box. It should work with CodeBlocks and Borland compilers as well, though I haven't tested it on those.

Adding support for Mac/XCode/Unix Makefiles is another ~3kb, most of that dealing with generating app bundles.