Thursday, March 19, 2009
Cygwin
I love Cygwin. Alex and I do all of our development on Windows PCs. With Cygwin, it's like I have a little unix machine sitting right inside my Windows box.
Having Cygwin installed on my PC means I can write scripts to automate all sorts of tasks. For example, I have a shell script that fires up Blender, produces hundreds of renderings of animation frames, then stitches the individual frames together into sprite sheets suitable for use in GameHalf.
Cygwin also allows me to test client-server programs right on my development PC. GameTwo is a multiplayer game, with a Flash client and a C++ server. The server is a command-line app, meant to run on a Linux machine in a data center. Do I want to build and push the server out to the production machine for every test? Of course not. Cygwin lets me compile and run the server locally, which is great for debugging. It's also convenient for demos because I can run both server and client on the same laptop.
Another thing I love about Cygwin is its installation and update tool. It's essentially a giant list of software to install. I select all of my favorite unix programs: compilers, debuggers, editors, image processors, etc, and the installer sucks over everything I need, including all libraries and other dependencies. It's super-painless, especially compared with what I had to deal with on some of the legacy Linux distros.
Having Cygwin installed on my PC means I can write scripts to automate all sorts of tasks. For example, I have a shell script that fires up Blender, produces hundreds of renderings of animation frames, then stitches the individual frames together into sprite sheets suitable for use in GameHalf.
Cygwin also allows me to test client-server programs right on my development PC. GameTwo is a multiplayer game, with a Flash client and a C++ server. The server is a command-line app, meant to run on a Linux machine in a data center. Do I want to build and push the server out to the production machine for every test? Of course not. Cygwin lets me compile and run the server locally, which is great for debugging. It's also convenient for demos because I can run both server and client on the same laptop.
Another thing I love about Cygwin is its installation and update tool. It's essentially a giant list of software to install. I select all of my favorite unix programs: compilers, debuggers, editors, image processors, etc, and the installer sucks over everything I need, including all libraries and other dependencies. It's super-painless, especially compared with what I had to deal with on some of the legacy Linux distros.
# posted by Rob : 12:28 PM
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