bookmark_borderAutomating your SQL migrations in your Java (web) Application with ActiveJDBC’s DB Migrator

Regardless of your language or framework – if you write a (web) app and read/write data to a SQL database (you manage), you’re bound to have changes on that database for whatever reasons.

Usually this is tackled by writing SQL migration scripts. For instance SQL files you can execute in your release procedure. You might pass these SQL files along with a ‘release document’ for a separate (OPS) department.

But what if we could automate this? Wouldn’t it be much nicer your application could detect which SQL files to execute, and then execute them? And when things break, it stops.

This blog post covers one of the many ways to do this. I start from a more general process and move to a more concrete Java implementation.

An automated deploy process

In this case I assume the following:

  1. You are not allowed to run any build process on your environment you deploy on. Ie there is no maven on your prod environment (nor acceptance or test).
  2. Up until now you execute SQL migrations manually. These are SQL snippets you have and you use a SQL editor (or command line) to execute them.
  3. You want to automate these steps. (of course you do!)

So let’s make the hand by hand process a bit more formal:

  1. Write your own SQL script (You execute the bits you need, or you write it in such a way you can execute it fully all the time.)
  2. You stop your (web)app
  3. You open your SQL editor / prompt and execute your SQL script
  4. On failure, you roll back and reboot your app (and figure out what went wrong)
  5. On success you boot your (web)app

And what would an automated SQL migration process look like?

  1. It should use a SQL file that can be executed multiple times and have the same result (Ie the 2nd, or 3rd time should not result in other behaviour. Ie: Idempotent)
  2. When your (web) app boots it should check if there are any SQL files left to execute
  3. The SQL files are executed in a specific order (from oldest to newest)
  4. It remembers which migrations have been executed
  5. Upon failure, stop executing migrations and stop booting

 

Notice the similarities!

Of course, you should have created a backup before doing any migration. Though that is out of scope of this post. It usually boils down to:

  • create backup
  • execute release procedure
    • upon fail, report back. Put back backup, and boot old app.
    • upon success, good for you!

Using ActiveJDBC’s DB Migrator

I have worked on a few projects using Ruby On Rails (abbreviated as RoR), which uses rake as build tool (kinda like maven). With that you could easily create new database migrations, execute migrations, etc. I was charmed by the simplicity.

In the land of Java, where I have used mostly Spring and Hibernate – I found ActiveJDBC (which is part of Javalite) which seems to be inspired by the approach RoR has taken.

Within ActiveJDBC there is also the usage of a migrator which reminds me of RoR’s rake db:migrate approach. It is a maven plugin and you call mvn db-migrator instead. It is very nice to create new migrations or run them.

Now the running part is the problem. While on your local machine you can run mvn db-migrator, I would not suggest to do that on my production (or any other) environment. So we need a way to run the migrator without the usage of maven.

Fortunately this is easy to fix.

Let’s get into some code.

 

Setting up ActiveJDBC in your Maven project

If you follow ActiveJDBC’s documentation it is easy to set up within your project. So I take that here, but expand upon it.

In your pom.xml you add the following as a plugin within the plugins section:

<!-- for creating db migrations with maven -->
<plugin>
  <groupId>org.javalite</groupId>
  <artifactId>db-migrator-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>${activejdbc.version}</version>
  <configuration>
    <migrationsPath>src/main/resources/sql/db-migrations</migrationsPath>
    <environments>MY ENVIRONMENT</environments>
  </configuration>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>${jdbc.groupId}</groupId>
      <artifactId>${jdbc.artifactId}</artifactId>
      <version>${jdbc.version}</version>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
</plugin>

Where there are a few details:

jdbc.groupId, jdbc.artifactId and jdbc.version is your db connector. It could be mysql for instance. You probably have this dependency already defined in your project. So take that and put it there.

For activejdbc.version I use now 2.0.

One other thing to note is that I have deviated a bit from the default migrationsPath. In my case I put the sql files into src/main/resources/sql/db-migrations.

If you set this up, you can now create a migration. Test it by executing:

mvn db-migrator:new -Dname=<your name for your migration script>

The naming of migration scripts does not really matter – although it is good to have a structure in it. Usually I tend to write them as <action>_<type>_<name of column/table>_extra_info. Which results into something like: create_table_Books.

Suppose you took the last example as input:

mvn db-migrator:new -Dname=create_table_Books

It will result into:

/src/main/resources/sql/db-migrations/20180711170817_create_table_Books.sql

As you can see, a timestamp is prepended to the name you have given.

The timestamp is used by ActiveJDBC to determine if the SQL script should be executed or not. It basically keeps a record of the last time it executed any scripts. Then it would diff against the sql scripts it found. Any newer scripts are executed in the correct order (oldest to newest). In other words, do not touch the timestamp.

I’d suggest you play a bit with the plugin first, before going to the next step.

 

Executing the SQL Migrations from your (web) application

Now the real fun begins.

Include db-migrator as dependency in your project

So not as a plugin but also as a dependencyLike so:

<!-- DB Migrations -->
<!-- yes we use it as a plugin but also as a dependency! -->
<dependency>
  <groupId>org.javalite</groupId>
  <artifactId>db-migrator-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>${activejdbc.version}</version>
  <exclusions>
    <exclusion>
      <groupId>org.sonatype.sisu</groupId>
      <artifactId>sisu-guava</artifactId>
    </exclusion>
  </exclusions>
</dependency>
<!-- DB Migrations -->

**NOTE** I exclude the sisu-guava version because it is an older version than 20.0 and it will cause RuntimeExceptions when using Preconditions. Since I use version 25.x or newer in my own projects it clashes with the old version. So if you use Guava yourself and it is a newer version, make sure you exclude the old one like above.

Using it as a dependency makes it reachable for our code, while at the same time we can use the mvn db-migrator command alongside it.

 

Making sure your migrations run before your ORM is loaded

Usually web apps use an ORM (like Hibernate) and it requires the state of the DB to match the objects within the code. So your migrations (which alter state of the DB) should be executed before the ORM is booted.

So let’s start with that. You do this by adding a listener to your web.xml and place it at the top of all listeners. Making sure it is executed first.  If you do not have any listeners, in my case they are positioned right after filters but before servlet definitions.

<!-- order is important, the database migrator must run before everything else -->
<listener>
  <listener-class>com.fundynamic.webapp.listener.DatabaseMigratorListener</listener-class>
</listener>

Now we have to make sure the class exists. Create the class, and let it implement ServletContextListener like so:

package com.fundynamic.webapp.listener;

import javax.servlet.ServletContextEvent;
import javax.servlet.ServletContextListener;

public class DatabaseMigratorListener implements ServletContextListener {

  // Public constructor is required by servlet spec
  public DatabaseMigratorListener() {
  }

  // -------------------------------------------------------
  // ServletContextListener implementation
  // -------------------------------------------------------
  public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent sce) {
  }

  public void contextDestroyed(ServletContextEvent sce) {
      /* This method is invoked when the Servlet Context 
         (the Web application) is undeployed or 
         Application Server shuts down.
      */
  }
}

I’d suggest you put some System.out or logging there and see if it is executed in your application in the correct order before going to the next step.

Executing the migrations

Here we get into the meat of the problem.

Let’s start with the code

package com.fundynamic.webapp.listener;

import org.javalite.db_migrator.maven.MigrateMojo;
import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;

import javax.servlet.ServletContextEvent;
import javax.servlet.ServletContextListener;

public class DatabaseMigratorListener implements ServletContextListener {

  private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(DatabaseMigratorListener.class);

  // Public constructor is required by servlet spec
  public DatabaseMigratorListener() {
  }

  // -------------------------------------------------------
  // ServletContextListener implementation
  // -------------------------------------------------------
  public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent sce) {
    String configFilePath = sce.getServletContext().getRealPath("/WEB-INF/classes/dbmigrator.properties");
    String migrationsPath = sce.getServletContext().getRealPath("/WEB-INF/classes/sql/db-migrations");

    try {
      MigrateMojo mojo = new MigrateMojo();

      mojo.setConfigFile(configFilePath);
      mojo.setMigrationsPath(migrationsPath);

      // we do not use environments like this, but we process the properties file in our build process with a maven profile
      mojo.setEnvironments("myenv");

      mojo.execute();
    } catch (Exception e) {
      log.error("Exception when executing migrator: ", e);
      System.exit(-1); // stop further execution of the webapp with a non zero error code
    }
  }

  public void contextDestroyed(ServletContextEvent sce) {
      /* This method is invoked when the Servlet Context
         (the Web application) is undeployed or
         Application Server shuts down.
      */
  }
}

 

Basically we do 2 things:

  1. We point to a dbmigrator.properties which provides properties for active-jdbc’s database migration properties
  2. We set up the directory where to find the SQL migration files (which is the same folder as we used in the plugin)

You can also see I set up an environment named myenv, in this case I use the same environment because I use maven profiles which interpolate environment specific variables for me. Another way would be to provide an environment variable so you can have 1 file but different property names.

Last but not least upon any exception we do a System.exit(1) to signify we should stop whatever we are doing.

Within the dbmigrations.properties file you will need at least credentials for the user which executes the migrations (I suggest you create a separate account for each environment for that), the file might look something like this:

myenv.driver=${jdbc.driverClassName}
myenv.username=${db.migrator.username}
myenv.password=${db.migrator.password}
myenv.url=${jdbc.url}

Here I also use serialized properties by maven, do note the variables all start with myenv which is the environment configured in the listener. The ${jdbc.driverClassName} and such are defined in my pom.xml.

Making execution optional

There are cases where you do not want to execute the migrations. For example you want to execute migrations automatically only on specific environments (ie, up till acceptance, but not yet on production). In that case

Add this in your web.xml

<!-- put this here somewhere on top of your web.xml file -->
<context-param>
  <param-name>executeDatabaseMigrationsOnBoot</param-name>
  <param-value>${db.migrator.execute}</param-value>
</context-param>

Again, the param-value is a serialized property. If you want to know more about those, see maven-war-plugin filtering options.

Either way you want to have the context-param so you can read out the value from your listener and do some logic with it.

I use a BoxingUtil class which is nothing but a simple helper method to make reading string to Boolean easier. The implementation of canParseBoolean is:

public static boolean canParseAsBoolean(String value) {
  if (Boolean.TRUE.toString().equalsIgnoreCase(value) ||
    Boolean.FALSE.toString().equalsIgnoreCase(value)) return true;
  return false;
}

and parseBoolean is exactly what it does, but it make sure the value is not null. It is not of much importance here.

To read the property and do some logic it becomes like this:

String value = sce.getServletContext().getInitParameter("executeDatabaseMigrationsOnBoot");
if (!BoxingUtil.canParseAsBoolean(value)) {
  log.error("Cannot parse value given for context-param (in web.xml) 'executeDatabaseMigrationsOnBoot', value is [" + value + "], but expected either [true] or [false]");
  System.exit(-1); // stop further execution of the webapp with a non zero error code
}

boolean executeMigrations = BoxingUtil.parseBoolean(value);

now you can execute the rest of the listener code when this value is true.

 

The listener, complete code example

For completeness sake, here is the listener fully, with a bit of logging and with the flag to execute or not.

package com.fundynamic.webapp.listener;

import com.fundynamic.util.BoxingUtil;
import org.javalite.db_migrator.maven.MigrateMojo;
import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;

import javax.servlet.ServletContextEvent;
import javax.servlet.ServletContextListener;

public class DatabaseMigratorListener implements ServletContextListener {

  private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(DatabaseMigratorListener.class);

  // Public constructor is required by servlet spec
  public DatabaseMigratorListener() {
  }

  // -------------------------------------------------------
  // ServletContextListener implementation
  // -------------------------------------------------------
  public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent sce) {
    log.info("--------------------------------------------------------------");
    log.info("--------------------------------------------------------------");
    log.info("---              DATABASE MIGRATOR STARTING                 --");
    log.info("--------------------------------------------------------------");
    log.info("--------------------------------------------------------------");
    String value = sce.getServletContext().getInitParameter("executeDatabaseMigrationsOnBoot");
    if (!BoxingUtil.canParseAsBoolean(value)) {
      log.error("Cannot parse value given for context-param (in web.xml) 'executeDatabaseMigrationsOnBoot', value is [" + value + "], but expected either [true] or [false]");
      System.exit(-1); // stop further execution of the webapp with a non zero error code
    }

    boolean executeMigrations = BoxingUtil.parseBoolean(value);

    log.info("executeMigrations flag is [" + executeMigrations + "]");

    if (executeMigrations) {
      executeMigrations(sce);
    } else {
      log.info("Execute migrations was disabled, skipping executing migrations automatically!");
    }

    log.info("--------------------------------------------------------------");
    log.info("--------------------------------------------------------------");
    log.info("---              DATABASE MIGRATOR FINISHED                 --");
    log.info("--------------------------------------------------------------");
    log.info("--------------------------------------------------------------");
  }

  private void executeMigrations(ServletContextEvent sce) {
    String configFilePath = sce.getServletContext().getRealPath("/WEB-INF/classes/dbmigrator.properties");
    String migrationsPath = sce.getServletContext().getRealPath("/WEB-INF/classes/sql/db-migrations");

    try {
      MigrateMojo mojo = new MigrateMojo();

      mojo.setConfigFile(configFilePath);
      mojo.setMigrationsPath(migrationsPath);

      // we do not use environments like this, but we process the properties file in our build process with a maven profile
      mojo.setEnvironments("myenv");

      mojo.execute();
    } catch (Exception e) {
      log.error("Exception when executing migrator: ", e);
      System.exit(-1); // stop further execution of the webapp with a non zero error code
    }
  }

  public void contextDestroyed(ServletContextEvent sce) {
      /* This method is invoked when the Servlet Context
         (the Web application) is undeployed or
         Application Server shuts down.
      */
  }
}

 

What if I want to rollback?

So there are 2 scenarios for this.

  1. you’re releasing, and something went wrong.
  2. your release went fine, but you want to revert some changes in the next release

In scenario #1 roll back to the backup you created before executing the release and migrations.

In scenario #2 your release went fine and you should create a new migration rolling back the changes. There is no reverting of SQL scripts. just a continuation. (roll-forward)

Conclusion

Automating your SQL migrations is pretty straight-forward. If you write idempotent SQL scripts and configure your (web) app to execute them automatically with ActiveJDBC’s db-migrator you get convenience for free. With this you are a step closer to automating your deploy process which is a very powerful tool for both developers and non-developers.

You can either use maven profile‘s or ActiveJDBC’s environments to differentiate properties. What you use is up to you.

If you found this helpful or have any questions, let me know.

bookmark_borderAnnouncing Indienamic & being realistic about earning money of your games

TLDR; I started a new company called Indienamic to build awareness for that brand so that I can build a community around the games I’m building. And, if you want to earn money from your games you have to cultivate that community, make high quality games, make people happy and do the number game. 15K visitors a month is not enough.

A while ago I said I decided to kickstart my dream to become an independent game developer (indie game developer).

In the incubator week I took a step back and reflected on how I wanted to achieve this seriously. I figured that in order to achieve this it would require me to build the game (of course) but also start with marketing right now.

So I introduce you Indienamic – a new identity where I’ll sell my games and blog about the journey building these games. A place where I hope to build a nice community of people who like the journey I am on and also like the games I’m selling. I strongly believe in a good and vibrant community in order to make anything you build successful.

The number game, how much do you need to earn a few bucks with selling games?

So lets get into a number game for a bit. Suppose you have a dream to build games and live from them. You’d need to earn money from your games. How much would that be? Well lets suppose you sell games from your website. A safe assumption is that 1% of your visitors will buy your product. Given that you can calculate how much traffic you would need in order to sell an amount of games. (this is excluding things like In App Purchases, this example is simply buying the game from your website)

Concretely…

Lets say, you earn 5 bucks a game and you get 15.000 visitors a month. This would result into (0.01X15.000) = 150 sold copies times 5 bucks == 750 bucks a month. 15K visitors may yield into 150 copies sold. You might want to ask more money, but I wager you equally need more visitors and even better a vibrant community.

Oh btw, 5 bucks is excluding any taxes. This alone would not cover all the bills to do full time game development.

Of course you also need good games, in fact you also need multiple games. And there might be other ways to get financially things in such a way you can make a living out of it.

Like I said before: My dream is build my own games and live from them. I want to do full time coding, making game music, graphics (learn, or buy), game design, blogging. On my own terms, creating cool games and making people happy!

And yes, this will take time, dedication, effort. The first step, Indienamic, is taken. I have a plan and I intent to stick with it. Part of that ‘plan’ is to let you know how it goes, and to be very transparent about it.

With that out of the way…

What is next?

What about the incubator week? Don’t worry, I’ll blog about that within a week – on Indienamic of course. There are still a few blog posts in the pipeline to share you the progress so far!

It would not make sense to set up a website if there was nothing to blog about right? 😉

If you are interested in my journey in game development – keep an eye out for Indienamic!

bookmark_borderRTS Game: Building the game, plan of attack

In my previous post I announced the start of my dream: building my own game.

In this post I will elaborate further about the goal I have set and how I intent to reach that goal. Writing a game is, like any project, quite a challenge. It is a continuous process of ‘zooming in’ (doing the actual work) and ‘zooming out’ (keeping an eye on the bigger picture). Only that way you can be sure you reach the goal in the most efficient manner.

Like any project, to keep it clear what to do, there is a list of tasks. It is wise to (ball-park) estimate how much time they will consume. At the same time there is a desired ‘launch date’. This brings a certain tension as you want as much value (features/tasks) done on launch date. Usually you have a minimal amount of tasks you have to get done.

Since I am now the developer and ‘product owner‘ at the same time I experience both sides. I need to investigate what to do to reach my goals. At the same time estimate and do the actual work.

This blog post covers the questions:

  • What needs to be done?
  • When will they be done?
  • What is the ‘end-date’?

What needs to be done?

In the grand scheme of things (zoomed out), roughly:

  • make the game ‘feature complete’
  • make my own graphics, sounds, etc
  • easily distributable & installable

What is ‘feature complete’?

I am heavily inspired by the first versions of C&C (RA), and I feel that to have a minimum playable game there should be at least:

  • 1 resource to ‘mine’ to earn money with (est: 8 hours)
  • 1 ‘power’ resource (est: 4 hours)
  • 1 faction to play with as a player (est: 0 hours)
  • A simple tech-tree (structures) (est: 8 hours)
    • Central structure to produce other structures (Const yard in C&C)
    • Power plant
    • Barracks
    • Factory
    • Refinery
  • A few units which have a Rock-Paper-Scissors mechanism (est: 16 hours)
    • Infantry
      • Two types: rocket launchers and soldiers
    • Light unit (fast, trike/quad)
      • 1 or 2 types
    • Heavy unit (tank)
      • 1 or 2 types
  • A (random generated) map to play on (est: 4 hours)
  • A very simple AI to play against (est: 12 hours)
  • A clear objective (ie, destroy enemy) (est: 4 hours)
  • A beginning and ‘end’ of the game. (menu to start from, and ‘game won/lost’ screen). (est: 8 hours)

And I think if you really want to push it you can shave off some features. I believe the first step is to get ‘full circle’ as soon as possible. Meaning you have a concept of a game. It has a beginning and an end.

From here on I can expand scope to my ideal game. But not before I have done the two other important things.

Estimation: 64-80 hours (20% deviation)

Make my own graphics, sounds, …

The next important part is graphics, sounds, music, story, etc. As for graphics. At the moment I use Dune 2 graphics as placeholders. Once I have the game mechanics in place and I know which units/structures I need for the minimum version I can start creating/getting these. So in a way they are not required immediately, but they are required whenever I want to commercially release my own game.

Changing the graphics will have impact on some implementations for sure, although I do set up the code as flexible as possible, there are always cases that I have not thought about.

There is a caveat. Creating graphics is hard. It is not my primary skill. To tackle this I could:

  • learn to create my own (? hours)
  • find someone else who is willing to do graphics for me (0 hours, but $$$)
  • find premade graphics in a market place and use that (4 hours searching, and $$$)

The same logic can be applied to Sounds, possibly Music.

Estimation: 0 – 10.000 hours

Seriously: this is a risk and I need to decide which strategy to get a more reliable amount of hours.

Easily distributable & installable

Release early, release often. It is a phrase I use all the time when I am working at clients. The same goes for my game. There is a difference however. Usually I work on mid-large web applications. There is no need for customers to install anything to use the latest version of the website. When an organisation has implemented Continuous Deployment, it can easily deploy new versions at will. Customers automatically have the latest version upon a new visit of the website.

For applications that need to be installed there are several platforms out there. There is a reason why the concept of an ‘App store’ is famous. It delivers a web-like experience.

There is a lot to win here, the first step though is to make sure any user is able to download a distribution for their platform (Windows, Mac OS, Linux) and able to install the game. I already took the liberty of wanting to support these platforms. So yes, I target the PC platform. No mobile, game console, etc.

In that sense there are a few steps to be taken:

  1. Offer a distribution somewhere (website? distribution platform? need to figure out)
  2. Provide an easy installation procedure (how? install4j? etc)
  3. Provide an app-store like experience. (use a distribution platform like Steam?)

Estimation: 8-16 hours

Estimation is based on creating an installer.

When will it be done?

Ok great, so there is a lot to do. So when will all this be done?

Lets bring a few numbers together. The estimates and the available time.

Bringing the estimates together

I just take the hours from all 3 paragraphs above, and sum them.

Min: 64 + 0 + 8 = 72

Max: 80 + 0 + 16 = 96

(I purposely did not add the 10.000 hours from the graphics section, it seriously is way too unsure).

So basically, I am estimating that 72 to 96 hours should be enough. Meaning, given an 8 hour work day it would take 9 to 12 days to get a minimum version which is distributable in the easiest way. Without doing anything about graphics, sounds, etc. (using dune 2 graphics as ‘stub’)

Estimated time needed: 72 to 96 hours

This excludes graphics.

How much time do I have?

To calculate the amount of time I have realistically I also do a min/max calculation. The minimum amount being the amount I am 100% sure of I have. The max being added hours I probably can spend, but I should not count on it.

Minimum hours are easy. I have at least 8 hours a week (1 work day a week) to spend. And every 8 weeks I take a week off to spend even more time. This means in a period of 10 weeks I can spend 14 days.

The max would be weekly 0 to 8 hours more. I can spend a weekend sometimes, an evening, sometimes more evenings. It really depends on a lot of things.

I like to think in periods of 10 weeks, I consider a full 10 weeks as an ‘iteration’. When working on Magic Gatherers we used this mechanism and it worked out pretty well. Also, every iteration had a particular focus. The first iteration there was ‘from idea to launched product’ for instance. For this game it would be different of course.

One other aspect with time is ‘when should it be done?’. The easiest thing would be to use the iteration end-date. Considering that the first work-day is within this week, this week is counted as the first of the iteration. An iteration of 10 weeks will mean the end date is 29th of october.

Meaning:

End-date: 29th of october 2017

Time available: 14 days to 19 days (112 to 152 hours)

Looks like an easy feat!… oh wait, I have seen this before. This probably means I forgot something. Ah yes, the graphics… and so much more unknowns. Looks like it will be a close one.

So when will it be done?

Yes, good question, so in this case I choose to use the fixed-time flexible scope approach. Although I do know if the minimal scope is not met I will not launch the product. Then again, I really DO want to launch a product so I probably will be very harsh on the scope and just make it fit.

This brings me to another topic, priorities and goal. What do I try to achieve with releasing something at the end of iteration #1? I will elaborate on that in a different blog post.

Conclusion

It looks like it is feasible to get a minimalistic feature complete game done within the first iteration. That would mean at the 29th of october (latest) a downloadable and installable game should be available.

However, there are more things that need to be done that were not explicitly defined in overall 3 phases. You can think of, writing dev blogs, youtube video’s for demoing features, a monthly in-depth video for Patrons and so forth.

The only way to know is to just do it!

bookmark_borderD2TM Rewrite – Development Blog – SDL initialization & initial game setup

In my previous post I have described a way to compile your project with a Maven style like project structure. Using that as basis I am busy rewriting my project Dune II – The Maker. This time I am using SDL.

Because I have started over I thought of writing blog posts about my progress. Blog posts will be about progress made, decisions taken, etc. This is by no means a real tutorial sequence, but you could follow the blog posts probably and make something out of it. Do note: In reality I am much further in development then my blog posts. The blog posts are based upon older revisions than HEAD. If you are interested in the most recent version you can get the source yourself.

In this blog post I will describe how I have started to setup the project. I already have a directory structure as described in my previous blog post.

My goal is to have a primitive architecture set up, I have used the first SDL tutorial as starting point.

The reason I went with a tutorial is that I wanted to be inspired by a different approach than I have done myself in the past. In fact, I have always just tried to do what I thought what was best. In this case I took the tutorial and from there I will change it how I think it should be. Its never bad to take a fresh look at things 🙂

The very first start was to create a Game class, it has the following class declaration:

#ifndef GAME_H
#define GAME_H

#include &lt;SDL/SDL.h&gt;   /* All SDL App's need this */

class Game {

	public:
		int execute();

	private:
		bool running;

		int init();
		void shutdown();

		void handleEvents();
		void update();
		void render();

		void onEvent(SDL_Event * event);

		SDL_Surface * screen;

};

#endif

The only function that needs to be exposed is the execute method. All other functions are used internally.
The SDL surface screen represents the main display (screen).

The Game class is implemented as follows:

#include &quot;gamerules.h&quot;
#include &quot;game.h&quot;

#include &lt;iostream&gt;

using namespace std;

int Game::init() {
	if((SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_VIDEO|SDL_INIT_AUDIO)==-1)) {
        	printf(&quot;Could not initialize SDL: %s.n&quot;, SDL_GetError());
	        return -1;
	}

	screen = SDL_SetVideoMode(640, 480, 16, SDL_SWSURFACE);
	if ( screen == NULL ) {
		printf(&quot;Unable to set 640x480 video: %sn&quot;, SDL_GetError());
		return -1;
	}

	return 0;
}

void Game::handleEvents() {
	SDL_Event event;
	while (SDL_PollEvent(&amp;event)) {
		onEvent(&amp;event);
	}
}

void Game::onEvent(SDL_Event * event) {
	if(event-&gt;type == SDL_QUIT) {
		running = false;
	}
}

void Game::update() {

}

void Game::render() {

}

void Game::shutdown() {
	SDL_Quit();
}

int Game::execute() {
	if (init() != 0) {
		return -1;
	}

	while (running) {
		handleEvents();
		update();
		render();
	}

	shutdown();

	return 0;
}

The execute function does basically everything. A game loop is in essence very simple. In fact the game is one big loop which does two things:
– update state
– show state

To update state, in this case we have separated two things:
– handle events (in SDL terminology, this means we handle input events. Which can have effect on the game state)
– update (here you actually update the game state)

That still remains updating game state, though a bit more split up. We could later split it into keyboard/mouse states. But, these things all are depended on the certain kind of game state you’re in. A main menu screen should react differently on mouse input than lets say the actual game playing. The current design has not given any direction yet what to do. We could have one big switch statement, but we could also do something better… I’ll come to that in a future blog post.

The init function basically sets up the application. I am not too happy about this in this stage, but for the initial setup it is good enough. I believe the factory pattern should be used for constructing a game object though, so I have already created a class for it. The reason is that i want to respect the Single Responsibility Principle. Constructing a Game object, which requires loading resources, setup SDL, etc, has nothing to do really with the basic Game object itself. In fact, as you will see in later blog posts, the Game object has the only responsibility and that’s calling all the right collaborator classes that make the game what it is.

Since I already know I will be using a factory class I already introduce one which for now does nothing spectacular:

Header:

#ifndef GAMEFACTORY_H
#define GAMEFACTORY_H

#include &quot;game.h&quot;

class GameFactory {

	public:
		Game create();

};

#endif

Implementation:

#include &quot;gamefactory.h&quot;

Game GameFactory::create() {
	Game game;

	// TODO: load resources for game, do SDL initialization, etc.

	return game;
}

Finally the main.cpp which has the entry point of the application:

#include &quot;gamefactory.h&quot;

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
	GameFactory gameFactory;
	Game game = gameFactory.create();
	return game.execute();
}

And thats it! The result is a game that is able to start, it has functions that declare several phases in the game and allows us to expand it further. Because of the factory we can also easily move initialization code out of the Game class.

If you would compile this, and run it, you would see:

A running application

As for developing applications, I believe a certain principle lies behind it. Most of it, you won’t really see. Often, with a few lines of code you can make a lot of stuff happen on the screen. But the actual work is ‘under water’:

bookmark_borderHow stackoverflow helps me to solve problems, without posting questions…

I really love stackoverflow. It brings developers, good ones, together. And because of the community active there, many questions I had where answered.

However, I dare to say half of my questions where answered by not posting any question

The reason why? Its simple. In order to get the answer you seek, you need to specify the problem precisely. Just posting “it does not work” with some vague description is not enough. It really helps to tell how you stepped through the problem, post snippets of code and so forth. If you are able to specify your problem like that, chances are high (at least with me) that the solution comes along with it. A so called “aha” moment. To me it is like Rubber Ducking. By the time you are half-way through writing down the exact problem you probably figured out the problem yourself.

The good news:

  • You probably found 9 out of 10 ‘doh ofcourse its so obvious’ issues. Preventing you to post ‘stupid’ questions…
  • You end up posting really hard questions (making you look so smart).

The better news:

  • There are people out there who are even smarter than you! And make you smarter in return!
  • You do not have to talk to a real rubber duck at your desk, just type your question at stackoverflow. (your co-workers will stop worrying about your mental state, talking to that duck all the time).

Its a win win win!

In other words…

Answer answer = null;
try {
Question question = formulateQuestionPrecisely();
answer = stackOverFlowService.postQuestionAndGetAnswer(question);
} catch (AhaMomentException ame) {
// never mind, found the solution myself!
answer = ame.getAnswer();
}

Thanks stackoverflow!

(don’t forget to credit those who give the best answers.. it’s highly appreciated)

Now I just read that posting your question, while you know the answer already, is a good thing. So the next time… consider that (but make sure your question has not been asked for already :)).