Developer Tools and Training

For many of the people on this team, these are tools and tutorials we learned with and use. We keep some links and information here to make it easy for people to jump into our team. Please don’t think that because you use different tools we don’t want your help, this is what we use and recommend, not what everyone should use for everything. If you have some info (especially good information about Visual Studio and Eclipse) we would love to include it.

Coding Tools

Since we have an open policy towards helping non-developers or at least non-C++ developers, we want to make it easy to get started as a developer and learn about our tools about our tools.

Compiler and Development Environment

We primarily use G++/MinGW for a compiler, Code::blocks for our Development environment, and GDB as our debugger. Code::blocks makes it all pretty seamless. There are a few different platforms that we do not have comprehensive steps for working on because we have not ported Catch! and the Mezzanine Engine to them yet. Please make appropriate revisions here once you have the steps to do something new.

• Windows Development Tools — Complete for XP/Vista (Win7 needs help)
• Linux Development Tools — Complete and easy
• MacOSX Development Tools — In Progress
• Eventually we will need Dev tool pages for Mac OS, Iphone, Web OS, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, PS3,Other Phones and handhelds

Source Revision Control

Git is our source control system. This is how we keep everyone up to up to date. See above for instructions on getting Git for your workstation. To grab a copy of the code run the following command from at a command line, or “git bash”
terminal. If you are using a graphical git client just use the URL portion of the command:
git clone git://github.com/BlackToppStudios/Mezzanine.git
For more details on Git usage see some third party tutorials:

• Git Comparison to SVN
• Hacker’s guide to git

Training

Since this whole project is being built in standard C++ (or certain external libraries), we thought it would be prudent to include some resources for learning it:

Standard C++ Tutorials

• Cplusplus.com beginners Tutorial — To help newer developers whet their appetite C++ Development.
• Google “C++ tutorial” for some very useful information.

Advanced C++ Information

• Just Software Threading tutorials on the std::thread library.
• How to link a library
• Using Const How and Why
• Rvalues, Lvalues and rvalues references(Which don’t exist yet )
• Angelika Langer has a fantastic article about c++ streams and streambufs. It explains how to connect a stream to any serializable data source