Stickman! (INTY Basic)

[GroovyBee]

... each test version released represented a milestone that was recorded in version control, accompanied by a "change log."

Same approach here. Rocketeer is currently at 50 versions and Hover Bovver got to about 40 or so. Not all of them were milestone releases mind, some were just versioned as and when.

[pimpmaul69]

 

Christmas Carol went through a rather protracted beta-testing phase. I used a private mailing list to communicate with testers, and each test version released represented a milestone that was recorded in version control, accompanied by a "change log." The final tally of releases is 44, including 33 "betas," two release candidates, seven official releases (with ROM and Cart editions counted separately), and the special editions awarded to the CvW winners.

 

-dZ.

counting your 8 sound fx demos i have 45 roms. I must be missing a few you didnt post. as for goatnom i have 23 roms. I believe in personally archiving the history of video games and intellivision is what i am into now. It is amazing how many roms are actually out there on intellivision. Almost 600 different rom files have been posted to the internet. With some help its been fun hunting them all down.

[+DZ-Jay]

counting your 8 sound fx demos i have 45 roms. I must be missing a few you didnt post. as for goatnom i have 23 roms. I believe in personally archiving the history of video games and intellivision is what i am into now. It is amazing how many roms are actually out there on intellivision. Almost 600 different rom files have been posted to the internet. With some help its been fun hunting them all down.

 

Well, you don't have the ROMs for the cart releases, nor the ones for the special editions.

 

By the way, those are "official" releases, which I track separately. In version control I have hundreds of "versions," each one with their changes recorded.

 

You don't have to worry about archiving them yourselves. They are out in the open, and there is a Yahoo Groups list with all the development and beta-testing history of Christmas Carol. If you want to study that, I can give you access to it.

 

-dZ.

Edited June 25, 2015 by DZ-Jay

[pimpmaul69]

 

Well, you don't have the ROMs for the cart releases, nor the ones for the special editions.

 

By the way, those are "official" releases, which I track separately. In version control I have hundreds of "versions," each one with their changes recorded.

 

You don't have to worry about archiving them yourselves. They are out in the open, and there is a Yahoo Groups list with all the development and beta-testing history of Christmas Carol. If you want to study that, I can give you access to it.

 

-dZ.

i wish i had a "special edition". Maybe this christmas. . And i "archive" out of pure ocd. Roms are my pokemons. "Gotta catch em all. and i would definitely be interested in studying christmas carol.

[First Spear]

 

 

That makes me think of something else... What do you use for source control and/or version control?

 

 

Well, you don't have the ROMs for the cart releases, nor the ones for the special editions.

 

By the way, those are "official" releases, which I track separately. In version control I have hundreds of "versions," each one with their changes recorded.

 

You don't have to worry about archiving them yourselves. They are out in the open, and there is a Yahoo Groups list with all the development and beta-testing history of Christmas Carol. If you want to study that, I can give you access to it.

 

-dZ.

[+DZ-Jay]

That makes me think of something else... What do you use for source control and/or version control?

 

 

 

I use SubVersion (SVN). On Windows I use TortoiseSVN and on the Mac I use Cornerstone.

 

dZ.

[intvnut]

I also use Subversion (SVN) for my Intellivision stuff. I'll probably stick with SVN for that as it has a decade's worth of history in the repository.

 

At work, I've switched to Mercurial (Hg), which works a lot like git. Mercurial is nice because it doesn't require a server, and any repository has a full history. (Git is similar.) There's a great tutorial by Joel Spolsky at hginit.com.

 

Git may also be a good choice, given free / low cost hosting on places like GitHub. The tutorial at hginit should largely apply to working with Git, since they work on a similar distributed repository model. The spelling of things might be a little different though between the two tools.

 

One thing I love about the Hg/Git model is that I can clone a repo to try an experiment, and while trying the experiment, I can keep committing intermediate steps. These commits get recorded in the experiment's repo, and only there. If the experiment succeeds, I push the changes back up to my main development repo. If the experiment fails, I can just delete the experimental repo (or ignore it / stop using it).

 

None of those intermediate commits related to the experiment show up on the mainline unless I pull them onto the mainline once the experiment works. That's incredibly powerful. That also ends the "It was working yesterday, but I made a bunch of changes to try something, and now I have to remember how to undo them all to get back to where I was" syndrome I used to have in college.

 

With an SCM under me, especially Hg/Git style SCMs, I quickly get into the habit of micro-commits. Every time I'm at a landing point where everything's working (or appearing to work), I commit. If I can break a single commit into multiple commits representing logically independent changes, I will. If later I notice something is broken, I can use the 'blame' functionality to see the last time each related piece was touched. That gives me a real quick way to try an experiment by checking out a separate repo with the changes rolled back, and essentially "home in" on the change that broke things. This works well if each commit is fairly small and isolated, and each commit represents a buildable version of the source tree.

Edited July 6, 2015 by intvnut