VS Community

As my friend Rich pointed out Visual Studio Community, a more fully fledged IDE than the Express version, is now available.

20 minutes into use...

• Peek definition is cool - you can even edit in the definition
• Intellisense is faster - perhaps usable with Unreal? The jury is out... but working intellisense is a huge productivity booster
• Working debugging visualiser macros (see this and follow directions at the bottom for UE4.natvis)
• NOTE: The installation under My Documents worked for me, not the other one
• This allows you to see strings and arrays in the debugger without the 
• Profiling support
• Better symbol resolution - I always meant to get engine symbols working with VSExpress but they just worked out of the box with the community edition.

Least crashing during Unreal iphone development

Running Unreal on my old MAC is troublesome, lots of crashes. As mentioned previously these seem largely memory related but it does sound like others find Unreal less stable on the MAC.

Here's what I do to improve the situation:

• Close everything, EVERYTHING, except the editor
• Close the launcher once the editor is
• Close iphoto as it probably booted up when you plugged in your phone
• Close itunes
• Close source control
• Close XCode
• Don't touch anything if you can help it.....
• Edit your project on a PC if possible, just use the MAC to cook - to do this open Unreal (close stuff!) launch on iphone then exit and iterate using XCode

Open up the activity monitor and purge anything with CPU or memory use that seems non critical and expensive.

I would guess that the MAC build stabilizes over time, though I am likely to buy more memory in the meantime.

New to GIT

I'm not going to go back over the technical details of GIT here but have a couple of pointers.

I developed a project using a local GIT repository for a while. This allowed me to track changes over time, undo changes, generally feel more secure in development. As I want to keep the code private until it reaches some level of maturity this also allowed me to avoid the $7 monthly charge for an offsite private depo.

When it came time to share the code on a different machine it became time to bite the $7 bullet - at this point though I found myself wasting a day of dev time learning how to setup a remote depot, copy my existing depot to it while maintaining history.

Short lessons learnt:
- GitHUB applications are useful, but slightly unstable
- It is much easier to start the depot online from the start. if you can then do so
- When scrubbing large files from the depot so you can upload it (there is a 100Mb limit) pay attention to any platform specific semantics (" vs ') and the fact that filenames are case sensitive
- The "bfg" sounds useful but I haven't managed to get it to run on my PC, will try on my MAC. For small solo projects the git filter-branch command isn't too slow - but you do have to be careful with the syntax (see above!).

Overall GIT is a very powerful tool with huge numbers of settings and seems like a good choice for solo or small scale development. As a windows developer who sometimes finds themselves in Linux, UNIX, MAC etc I'd say the learning curve is steep even with GitHUB (which has a tendency to say useful things like "failed" rather than give you the full output) and when setting up a new depot would allow yourself some time to get things working just right.

Having used Perforce, SVN, CVS, GIT and SourceSafe I'm still sitting in the Perforce camp but mainly because of the nice frontend and GIT is growing on me fast.