Monday, May 16

Emas and the Unreal Development Kit Workflow

I've been spending some more time with the Unreal Development Kit, as it seems to be trending in the world of games development, and partly to keep my hand in. I've been developing an Emacs based workflow and I thought I'd just quickly blog about it, in case my Emacs Lisp is of any help to any Emacs oldbies confronting this tech. The usual way to develop for it is with nFringe's pixel Mine and Visual Studio. And while Visual Studio is an excellent debugger, it lacks in the actual text editing department, as even Vi users know...

My tools of choice are Emacs AutoComplete mode, which gives Emacs intelli-sense like capabilities over a broad range of languages (it's pretty magical with Lisp, as you'd expect) and the good old Exuberant Ctags, primed to tag Unrealscript, with the following regular expressions in ~/ectags.cnf. I have to say ectags-select is very handy for working with these, as an alternative to the usual way of working with tags in Emacs as it lets you browse the enormous range of options that pop up.

These are the expressions to use for Exubrerant Ctags when tagging Unrealscript.




This is the support code I have: a set of interactive functions for invoking the udk, building code, running the editor. It creates a group of settings that can be customised with M-x customize-group udk. I watch the log in an emacs buffer via global-revert-tail mode. I have not yet added support for UDK log files to compilation mode, but thats an obvious tweak I'll try at some point. I've had enough fiddling with regular expressions for now.



PS: I thought I'd reproduce the unrealscript mode here, just in case. It lives where you put your other extra mode files.