Stanislav Arnaudov

Mission Control

· Stanislav Arnaudov · 2 minute read · 360 words

.## Abstract {#abstract}

Mission Control is the product of my frustration with MSBuild and Visual Studio. Everything happens super slow in Visual Studio, if I want to make something happen, I always end up battling MSBuild configurations in the UI, things are not obvious, and all of this eats my time without giving me any deeper knowledge of… anything really.

This led to me spending a week or two developing and fleshing out Mission Control – tool written in C-styled C++ that uses nothing but Win32 libraries to do everything that it needs to. And it does not need to do much. For the most part, Mission Control accepts some sort of “command” and generates and executes a .bat file that “executes” this command. The BAT file usually contains calls to cl.exe with the appropriate flags to build my projects. In the beginning, this was all Mission Control was capable of. Now I use it for various build commands in DirectXer.

Principles

The core principles I follow and how they apply to Mission Control:

  • Performance – it should do very little and it should do it fast
  • Near zero dependencies – it should compile on its own and depend only on system libraries that come with windows
  • Simplicity – changing something should be trivial and itss inner workings should be obvious to understand.

Notable achievements

Currently, I use Mission Control for:

  • Building my sample games
  • Building my auxiliary tools like CIBot, AssetBuilder, PerfChecker and SceneChecker.
  • Compiling my HLSL shaders to C++ header files.
  • Creating certain soft links in the DirectXer repository because some applications expect certain things to be in certain places

  • Build all the third-party libraries I use

    freetype, ImGui, Opticks Stb

Some other nice features of Mission Control that make my life easier:

  • Can build games with Clang and enable build instrumentation for build performance investigations.
  • Can build in Release and Debug modes
  • Can insert extra C pre-processor defines for build passes as command line arguments
  • Can checkout git revisions
  • Can be started in daemon mode where it will accept commands though sockets and execute them.

Some of these are specifically there for nice integration with the CIBot