Tony’s Blog

While writing the SNTask utility I had to do some network programming. I have done a lot of network programming in the past mostly using C and Berkley sockets. It’s pretty simple to get basic communication going with that combination but anything more sophisticated requires much more design, debugging, and maintenance. Using Python instead of C helps but I still have to use sockets. SNTask is a utility which is supposed to aid our game development. It’s not supposed to spawn a development cycle of its own. I didn’t want another piece of software our team had to design, debug, and maintain. SNTask has a lot of requirements but its purpose is to quicken our development. Luckily there is a wonderful networking framework called Twisted which allows us to add all the features we want to SNTask while still keeping the workload to a minimum. Twisted is written in Python and released under the MIT licence. Twisted greatly simplifies the task of writing almost any kind of network application. When programming with raw sockets I would usually dig around my computer and find my old networking library. It’s a small library I wrote along time ago which can send and receive packets over UDP or TCP. I would then start creating the application using that same old library. Twisted replaces all that and allows me to immediately start creating the application. It supports TCP, UDP, SSL, IMAP, SSH, FTP, HTTP and much more. The Twisted Framework has already allowed us to reduce the development time for SNTask while boosting its feature set. I have only been using Twisted for a couple of days so I have only grazed the surface of what it can do. So far I am very impressed.

I have been working on setting up the new automated build system. We were having some hardware problems with the new server which was very unfortunate. Denrei tracked it down to the new gigabit NIC I installed. For now we are going to revert back to the 100 Mbit onboard NIC. Despite those problems the build system seems to be working well. The server seems stable so I am finishing the automatic game source asset creation. The build system notifies developers through email about updates to the distributed files. This is a good method for keeping developers up to date on the status of distributed files but it is still far too slow. If a developer is using files which are changing then they need to know immediately when those files change. This led us to create a small utility called SNTask. It’s a small application which sits in the task bar. It shows developers the build system’s status in real-time so they will know immediately when there have been changes to files they are working with.