Using TortoiseSVN to keep track of your project changes.

Before moving on with the creation of the game I wanted to talk about a version control system that is often used in development projects called SVN, which is a system that controls the changes in the files and assign a version every time you upload an updated file, allowing you to compare between versions of a file or revert changes to a previous version.

One of the most used programs for this is called TortoiseSVN which can be downloaded from http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads.html

After installing the program you will be able to get a working copy of the source code of these tutorials by going to the folder where your solutions are located and right-click on the folder so the context menu appears, then select the option SVN Checkout and a window will pop up, something like this:

So the only thing that needs to be done is to place the URL of the repository (such as gpftw.googlecode.com/svn/trunk) we want to checkout and the directory where the working copy will be placed (you can change E:\Dev to the folder of your choice).

 After clicking OK, the svn program will download the files and report success or failure:

Now if we change a file of the working copy, TortoiseSVN will report changes and display them with a red icon:

Right clicking on the file will give us the SVN -> Diff option in the menu that we can use to find where the file got changed:

After we modified our file we can commit the changes to the repository by right clicking on the folder of the working copy and select SVN Commit from the menu.

Right clicking on a folder or file of the working copy will also provide the Show log option:

For creating a new repository you can use Google Code (http://code.google.com/) or another web service, but this will also make your code public it most cases. Other option available is to create the repository in your own system. For this you can right click a folder of your choice and select the "Create repository here" option:

After that you will be told the url of the repository that you have to set when you want to checkout a working copy. In this example will be file:///E:\MyRepository

This should be enough to get you started with SVN, though there's much more about it that you should research on your own. Now you will be able to download the tutorial files from the repository and use TortoiseSVN to help you managing your projects.

In the next tutorial we'll be talking about header files and how to organize your code properly into different code files, and we will also be adding a timer to our game loop so we can update our data from the actual time between frames. Let's continue making our game there!