Re: Sweng-Gamedev Digest, Vol 54, Issue 1

So from what I can gather: On source update, you build, serialize the game
state, reload the entire engine, and then de-serialize the entire game state
again? You were able to do this whole process in a matter of seconds?

Indy

On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 12:56 AM, Don Williamson
<[email protected]>wrote:

> > It's not clear what you mean by " completely isolated from the Unreal
> codebase" since you also mention that this uses Unreal.
> > Other then that, this sounds very exciting. How did you allow hotloading
> of c++ code? esp in regards to updating structures/classes.
>
> It's isolated in the sense that the dependency is one way: Unreal calls
> into the engine whereas the engine never calls back. I documented a method
> on-list a while back so you should easily be able to find it in the
> archives. You can achieve it all with a very simple library, such as:
>
>     http://bitbucket.org/dwilliamson/reflectabit/
>
> I've been working on a PDB version of the above on and off for the last
> couple of years - it really transforms the C++ language (e.g. you get a
> constant-time typeof operator and custom attributes). But it's not
> sufficiently developed to be releasable yet (and it's crunch time at the
> moment). But anyway, Microsoft and Sony really need to pull their finger
> out, step around this C++0NaN nonsense and help us out with some
> compiler/linker mods.
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* "Nicholas "Indy" Ray" <[email protected]>
> *To:* [email protected]; Don Williamson <
> [email protected]>
> *Sent:* Thu, May 13, 2010 5:14:17 AM
>
> *Subject:* Re: [Sweng-Gamedev] Sweng-Gamedev Digest, Vol 54, Issue 1
>
> On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 10:17 AM, Don Williamson <[email protected]
> > wrote:
>
>> I did the first one for the Conviction engine, within Unreal and in C++.
>> We built the engine from scratch and hence had very fast compile times
>> (completely isolated from the Unreal codebase, custom windows header, DLL
>> with minimum dependencies, etc). At one point you could load a level within
>> UnrealEd while iterating on some C++ code, hit build and link - this would
>> complete within 2-3 seconds - and then see your changes reloaded within
>> another couple of seconds. If you wanted you could sit editing code for
>> hours (changing data structures, adding/removing functions, etc) without
>> bringing the game/editor down, maintaining the ability to step-debug it. It
>> was stupidly powerful but not fully developed... though certainly proved
>> that "hot-loading" C++ code changes is more than possible and really should
>> be the standard these days.
>>
>
> It's not clear what you mean by " completely isolated from the Unreal
> codebase" since you also mention that this uses Unreal. Other then that,
> this sounds very exciting. How did you allow hotloading of c++ code? esp in
> regards to updating structures/classes.
>
> Indy
>
>

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