I'm relatively new to module creation, and I'm curious how others do it.
After a bunch of experimentation I have my development environment working
fairly well. I thought I'd share what I do, and find out if others had
different suggestions.
First, while the Vassal editor works great, I often find it much more
efficient to edit the buildFile myself. I usually do this by actually
editing the file or generating XML programmatically. I find that my time
editing a module is split three ways, one third in the Vassal editor, one
third in VIM (text editor), and one third generated by Perl programs.
(OK, I completely left out the graphics work)
Because I like to work outside of the editor, I needed a good process to
rebuild modules and extract the data from modules. So I ended up with a
script called "extract" and a script called "rebuild" which do exactly
that (create the zip archive and extract the zip archive).
So if I'm in the Vassal editor and I'm finished with some edits, and then
want to do some manual edits, I save and close. Then run "extract", then
edit the buildFile, then run "rebuild", then I can test the module.
That brings me to the Vassal starting scripts. I've got one that brings
up the module in the editor, one that starts Vassal to playtest (without
the editor), and two more like the first ones but they use the beta
version of Vassal.
This entire ball of wax is then contained in a Subversion repository.
Since only the source data (buildFile,images,html files, etc) are held
within Subversion it doesn't take up tons of space as the module gets
updated and new versions checked in (if the binary module itself was
stored, it would grow pretty fast). Of course some other things go into
subversion, like project notes, and PhotoShop source files, etc.
Subversion is great! I can simply do a "diff" on the buildFile to see
exactly what has changed, even if I used the Vassal editor to make the
changes. You can also branch your development to try out different
things. And there's always the failsafe, if something gets really messed
up, you can just "svn revert" to the last version of the project and be
back in business.
Then on my server I have a Subversion "post-commit" hook which checks out
the HEAD revision from the repository, builds the module, and posts it on
my website for my beta testers. So to put out a new module, I simply have
to check my changes into Subversion.
I guess my big questions are:
Do folks mainly use the Vassal editor or do others find themselves in
the buildFile also? If so, how do you manually edit it?
Am I the only nut that goes though all this trouble? Right now I'm
working on my sixth module, and I'm not sure I could have as much done
as I do now without this environment set up.
Cheers
-Tim
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