Engine revisions and lack of comments

#1 Dave I totally agreee with you.

As my development progresses along in our game, the updates are going to be a very critical thing to know, because I will be adding Mozilla and MySQL, which are encapsulated API's, but still......

Not everything works perfectly

The subtle changes, like renaming a variable or changing a method definition, could make or break a build...

Just a thought

#2 I think everyone here at GG agrees. We also need to to make sure change comments are more detailed so that they are a real source of information when the latest build doesn't work.

#3 There arent that many people actually making live changes anyway though are there?

If your using something like CVS and Araxis Merge, its easy as hell to get your projects merged.

Basically, its going to be best to simply build off of the main head revision and keep yourself updated from the CVS as much as possible.

Phil.

#4 I think the issue is not one of integration itself, so much as having enough information available to resolve problems when the integration fails :) and of course just generally increasing the number and quality of comments in the code.

#5 yes, yes,I would tend to agree with you Tim...

comments don't have to be limited to only the updated code either. more comments in general is a good idea (in general :)

Cheers

#6 A question. Since dOxygen is being used to document the engine are people remembering that this includes the ability to have your comments included in the documentation as well? I found that as functions are worked on it is a good idea to add a comment on what the function does in the format that dOxygen can recognize so that the intent of the function gets passed into the documentation as well - no sense doing a job twice...

#7 I think the single biggest problem with the engine is the severe lack of documentation. 99% of the documentation is just what dOxygen generates from the source code. i.e. stuff I could see from opening the workspace in Visual Studio.

If there's a central place for tutorials, I've not found it. I don't mind reading thru code to get details on how something works, but having to read thru it to understand what ANY function does is pretty annoying.

The 3-4 pages of 'general' documentation is nowhere near enough. I'm not really trying to complain here, the engine is damned impressive, and for $100 I honestly wasn't expecting much. But so far the documentation was the only thing that lived _down_ to those expectations.

#8 Documentation, and some of the tool issue, are our biggest problems. Right now were trying to take on some of the tool problems; Mark wrote the new mission editor and is now looking at the Max exporter, I've been working on a MilkShape exporter. Next, I think, is some tutorials and then documentation...