Vancouver Lisp Users Group meeting for January 2009 - Practical SCons for Game Development
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Now that we have some "good ol rainy weather" again in Vancouver and
no longer have to
shovel snow, it's time to schedule some technical
meetups so that we can avoid the onset of
cabin fever. ;-)
Dean Giberson gave a presentation on
SCons at the
Montreal International Game Summit (MIGS) 2008 and will give a
version of that presentation to our first lispvan meeting of 2009. For
those who aren't familiar with SCons, the
SCons site describes it as:
"SCons is an Open Source software construction tool-that is, a next-generation build tool. Think of SCons as an improved, cross-platform substitute for the classic Make utility with integrated functionality similar to autoconf/automake and compiler caches such as ccache. In short, SCons is an easier, more reliable and faster way to build software."Dean has been heavily involved in the Game Industry for some time (see here and here for details on his earlier "Using PLT Scheme for Game Development" lispvan presentation and some biographical details), so this promises to be an interesting follow-on to his previous lispvan presentation.
Here's the "official" meeting notice:
Topic: Practical Scons for Game Development
Presenter: Dean Giberson
Date: Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
Time: 7pm - 10pm (or whenever)
Venue: The Hackery, 304 Victoria Dr (entrance off Franklin), Vancouver (see map)
Summary: SCons has quietly been gaining usage throughout development houses, it provides a robust and powerful build system which fixes problems that caused people to question using make for large builds.
SCons was used in the production of "SOCOM: Confrontation" for the PS3. We will show how it was used to build data, ensure consistency, and reduce turn around time.
Care will be taken to show extensions developed explicitly for a production game house, and how they can be applied to other projects.
Join us for a beer (bring your own - there's a fridge), some technical chat, and an opportunity to get back out into the "real world" after a few weeks of holiday fun in the snow! ;-)
