[plt-scheme] Vancouver Lisp Users Group meeting for January 2009 - Practical SCons for Game Development

Hi all,

Now that we have some "good ol rainy weather" again in Vancouver and
no longer have to shovel snow, it's time to schedule some technical
meetups so that we can avoid the onset of cabin fever. ;-)

Dean Giberson gave a presentation on SCons at the Montreal
International Game Summit (MIGS) 2008 and will give a version of that
presentation to our first lispvan meeting of 2009. For those who
aren't familiar with SCons, the SCons site describes it as:

"SCons is an Open Source software construction tool-that is, a
next-generation build tool. Think of SCons as an improved,
cross-platform substitute for the classic Make utility with integrated
functionality similar to autoconf/automake and compiler caches such as
ccache. In short, SCons is an easier, more reliable and faster way to
build software."
Dean has been heavily involved in the Game Industry for some time (see
here and here for details on his earlier "Using PLT Scheme for Game
Development" lispvan presentation and some biographical details), so
this promises to be an interesting follow-on to his previous lispvan
presentation.

Here's the "official" meeting notice:

Topic: Practical Scons for Game Development
Presenter: Dean Giberson
Date: Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
Time: 7pm - 10pm (or whenever)
Venue: The Hackery, 304 Victoria Dr (entrance off Franklin), Vancouver
Summary: SCons has quietly been gaining usage throughout development
houses, it provides a robust and powerful build system which fixes
problems that caused people to question using make for large builds.

SCons was used in the production of "SOCOM: Confrontation" for the
PS3. We will show how it was used to build data, ensure consistency,
and reduce turn around time.

Care will be taken to show extensions developed explicitly for a
production game house, and how they can be applied to other projects.

Join us for a beer (bring your own - there's a fridge), some technical
chat, and an opportunity to get back out into the "real world" after a
few weeks of holiday fun in the snow! ;-)

Updates/links will be posted on my blog: http://bc.tech.coop/blog/090107.html

If there are no technical hiccups, I will post a screencast of the
presentation at a later date.

--
Bill Clementson