I’ve recently been moved across to a new project, one which I’m enjoying immensely. It has two properties which make its development particularly interesting: it is massively data-driven, and it is being developed across a multitude of platforms (five at last count). In order to accomplish this feat we are using make.
make, and the UNIX-style command line environment it typically utilises, is often forgotten or even scorned by programmers studying games-specific courses, or even some of those I’ve met in the industry itself. We’ve become used to IDEs which enable us to drag and drop files, edit them, compile, run and debug all in the same window. These have their advantages: the initial learning curve is much shallower, and they can deliver a tightly integrated experience (which is rather the point). They have their disadvantages too, however, and console-driven build management tools like make shouldn’t be discarded out of hand.