Many of you may be shocked, perhaps even appalled, to learn that Skirmish has not been under any form of source version control until very recently. To be entirely honest, I have merely been making backups of my entire development folder and storing them on a few different mediums. To date, I have from Skirmish_Dev1.zip up to Skirmish_Dev63.zip. [grin]
Well, allow me to now put those fears to rest. After a painful amount -- sickening, really! -- of rearranging my folders, files, resources, scripts, and everything else, I now have Skirmish on Subversion. Huzzah! I was mainly putting the job off because I have hundreds upon hundreds of files in my Skirmish project directory that were hazardously strewn about without any sort of organization. Thanks go out to Rip-Off for pushing me over the edge and convincing me that this needed to be done.
I couldn't be happier with my choice to finally make the move. Netbeans has excellent integration with SVN, and managed to figure out both that my project was managed by it, and does nifty line-by-line highlighting of things I've changed or added in the current working revision. I've even begun doing self-code-reviews via diffs to look over my changes carefully before committing. I am utterly thrilled with this step up that my development professionalism has taken.
Website++
Another recent 'sin' of mine was that my website was previously entirely HTML, which meant that all of those pretty headers/sidebars were coded in on a per-page basis. This meant that any changes to those needed to be manually done to every page file on the website. What a pain!
I decided that using PHP was the easiest route. After creating a 'head.hml' and 'tail.html' file and filling them with the header/footer data (which includes the sidebars), it was just a matter of plugging in
(page content!) If you glanced at the site, you probably noticed the three boxes: 'players online', 'games hosted', and 'master server online/offline'. At the moment all three are just fixed text, but I will be using PHP to read in some raw dumps from the Master Server to populate them with real-time dynamic data. I'm really looking forward to further integrating the Master Server and the website together as the project moves forward.
The forum!
Last, but not least, is the Skirmish Online forum which is now operational. I'm using phpBB, which was a snap to install, and that I have been happy with in the past. Now I just need to get the user-count up! Feel free to join and help create the illusion that we're bustlingly busy! [grin]
