Starting with an unmodified Project Template.

The Infamous Project Template

The first sentence looking at Project Anarchy's Project Template is "I don't need all these things, let's cut everything out".

It is indeed an early optimization.
To who don't know how bad it is, trust me when I say, it is the mother of every other bad things a man can do to loose his time and a time bomb you set to explode at  a random time during a project.

I'm totally going to use the unmodified Project Template!!!

Some good reasons to use Vanilla Project Template:

• It is just compatible with all the debugging and profiling tools of the engine.
• It is now (version 2013.2) set up with vision, ai, physic and behaviour and fmod plugins so you can test most of the engine out.
• You don't really need to cut something you don't use before the final release of your game.
• It is just set up to use a game plugin compatible with vforge in play in editor and this is just what you need to have a good start.
• Project Anarchy is growning fast so it is very common to see many changes and additions in updates so every changes you make to Project Template have to be merged and possibly modified in future and during your development time you could get 3 or 4 updates.I don't want to merge my changes every time as I don't like to see hundreds of compiling error when I update.
• If you change things a lot and cut down parts when something strange happens you don't know if it is in your code or in the provided one or if most probably you have cutted down some functionality you are missing at that point.
• When you ask for help everyone using a Standard project Template can help you.

If want to add that if you modify the template while using perforce or similar products and you plan wisely precise code refactoring nothing bad can happen to you expecially if you can revert very specific things back.

Game Plugin.

On pc it is a dll by default and on mobile it is a static library.
This second project contained in project template is the heart of the game and the only part of the template I will ever change for a while.
I wanted to have 2 plugins one for a common framework and one for my actual game, but for now I decided to stick with one, this is very easy to change later.
You need all your game relevant code to be in this project if you want to play it in vforge.

Android

Some time ago I switched to standard android deployment and toolchain and made an eclipse project to manage it.
It is a great way to develop the java part of your android application, but for this new project I want to stick with the provided android deployment tool.
I want to add java integrations at very later time so I can focus on the game for now.

It will be interesting to test out compilation with Nvidia Visual Studio plugin for android it offers complete visual debugger integration.

Perforce

It's wrong to think at source versioning to something only teams with more programmers needs.

I will totally use this as it is integrated in vforge.

Perforce is a great safe net when you rush things out and let you test and integrate things faster so you totally want to learn and use it

It has becomed my favourite source version control software.

I will use it for every text based file.

I love text based preset files just for this.

I tend to serialize objects in textual file formats in the development stage, just to manage them better by source versioning, to then ship, binary version of them, on release.

I don't believe I would go with this ascii to binary conversion in this project as I don't believe Project Anarchy support it directly in his serialization code( I have to check), but it is something that pays out in bigger projects.

Visual Studio Project Template

Project Template Visual Studio projects is based on a Visual Studio Project Preset file.
I like this way to configure the project so I wanted to make my own presets were i can easely integrate and cut out features(es original project doesn't include scaleform linking and preprocessor config).
They are contained in your Project Anarchy folder and they are xml based so I copied them in a local directory to manage them with perforce.
If you don't know what i'm saying just skip this part and do all your configs as you normally do.

It Doesn't End Here.

I will talk further of some specific Project Template Details in another post.