FROM THE BLOG

[General] Repository/Build Server Migrations

These last few weeks we’ve worked on a couple of things, but the main ones for the KAG side of THD has been Repository and Build Server changes.

For those not well versed in software development, a repository is a place that stores all the latest versions of the files (code, images, sounds) that makes up that piece of software, as well as all the known history of all those files – this means that we can code fearlessly without being worried about making changes that break something, as we’ve got the ability to get previous versions of each file.

For a long time, the engine that powers KAG and the game itself have lived in a single repository. This has been fine as we’ve only had one game at a time being worked on with the same engine.

With the addition of Trench Run (which uses the same engine), this becomes problematic – if we want to run the game from the same place, we need to specify which game to run, we have to have separate folders for each game, and so on; it also makes building auto-update files on the build server really annoying.

As such, we’ve split the repository into separate Engine and Game repositories, with KAG and Trench Run living in separate Game repositories.

While this will make building auto-update files, testing, running, and developing the 2 separate games at the same time easier, it has introduced a couple of issues, mainly with merging some of the bigger trench run engine changes into the KAG version of the engine, breaking things like menus and the HUD overlays which were previously hard-coded.

As such, the next KAG patch will be delayed as we have to reconcile these changes, wait on sysadmins to get the build/autoupdate system working properly again, and re-implement some of the functionality that is no longer handled automatically by the engine. We understand that this is reasonably boring news, but this kind of back-end stuff will let us move forward more comfortably on all the fun stuff one it’s done.

We’ll keep you up to date as this progresses and hopefully be sharing more Trench Run gifs in the mean time.

Cheers,

Max/Geti