Every so often we’ve got to talk tools.
Current Toolset #
The Blog #
- As the footer says, powered by Octopress. I’ve made a few tweaks, but not much. My only complaint is the lack of a few options in code snippets.
- Text edited with Notepad++ for the moment.
- Still images captured with Snipping Tool, animated GIFs captured with Screen To Gif, edited with GIMP 2.8.
- Hosted on DreamHost.
Source Control #
- GitLab - partially just to have experience using something other than GitHub.
DS Server (drag-spin-exp) #
- Code of actual Dragon’s Spine fork edited and compiled with Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2013 Version 12.0.31101.00 Update 4.
- Database stored in Microsoft SQL Server Express Edition with Advanced Services (64-bit) Version 10.50.4000, aka Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2.
- Both of these are “free” community versions, and are both running on Windows 7 Professional.
DS Visualizer (ste-reez-muvi) #
- Currently using Unity 4.3.2f1 under Windows 7.
- Editing this code using MonoDevelop v4.0.1 (included); not a great experience, as it locks up on me occasionally.
A Few Planned Changes #
- Octopress 3 - probably sooner than later, if just so my code snippets can be nicer.
- Visual Studio Tools for Unity - to get away from MonoDevelop and see what these tools can do.
- Unity 5 - to be up-to-date, but primarily because the Profiler has been moved into the (free) Personal Edition in 5.
Did you do anything today? #
In order to isolate server performance issues from visualizer performance issues, I moved the server and database onto a separate machine. There’s not much to show, just one piece of advice: Before assuming that you have a server configuration issue, disconnect your network from the outside world and disable Windows Firewall temporarily; if things suddenly work, that’s your problem. I didn’t make much progress until I could verify that my connection string, credentials, etc were fine and the problem was Windows dropping my UDP packets before they could get to the SQL Server Browser. Be sure to only make the necessary changes to the firewall. Microsoft’s docs are of some use there.
Watching Rocky the Orc kill the wolves that tragically spawn inside his shop…from another machine!
Running client and server on two separate machines, neither of which is your primary development machine, is an important milestone which I should have reached sooner. These days, there’s another important milestone: running the server components in “the cloud”. I’ll need to look into that soon (it’d be much easier if this stuff weren’t Windows-based).