Helium

From Nocturnal Initiative

(Redirected from AppFramework)
Jump to: navigation, search

Contents

Overview

Helium is basically a generalized snapshot of the core application and library code that Insomniac Games' uses for its own proprietary tool set.

Features

The big ticket features provided by Helium include:

  • Handy Code Snippets
    • C++ Delegate/Event System
    • Pointer to reference counted objects
    • Pointer to heap allocated arrays
    • Endian conversion code
    • Insertion ordered std::set
    • Reversible key and value std::map
  • Interprocess Communication
    • Fast non-blocking message-based design
    • Works over BSD-style sockets (TCP) or Named Pipes
    • Windows platform included, additional platforms are easily added
  • Debugging Helpers
    • PDB-based symbol information querying
    • Capture stacks within your program making heap object tracking and leak debugging easier
    • Give your application automatic crash reports dispatched via email that contain handy user/machine informaton, call stack, and memory page allocation stats
  • Console Output Manager
    • Log console output to one or more trace files
    • Color code the console output based on Error/Warning/Debug print statements
    • Throttle output verbosity (configured via command line arg or environment variable)
    • Outline nested stages of processing performed by your application (for builders/exporters)
    • Augment crash reports with the current outline state of your application (very useful for tracking down new crash bugs)
  • Instrumenting Profiler
    • Cross platform (Windows and PS3 currently)
    • Macro-instrumented stack timer based profiler
    • Concise profile report printed out at program exit
    • Logs instance data out to human readable log file (Profile Analyzer is in development)
  • Perforce Integration
    • We use perforce for both code and data here at Insomniac
    • This wrapper wraps the string-command based P4API with a more structured API
  • C++ Reflection
    • Serialize objects to binary or human-readable XML
    • Flexible parsing mechanics allow you to read in old versions of your class
    • Supports changing member type (automatically within reasonable limits), and supports renaming member variables via virtual API
    • Supports serializing std::vector, std::set, and std::map containers with primitives or pointers to other reflect objects
    • Supports serializing enumerations and bitfields using string representation (supports reordering enum elements)
    • Supports automated object comparison, conversion, and cloning
    • Supports introspection using a visitor interface
  • Data-Driven Property UI
    • Uses standard wxWidgets controls
    • Interpreter classes examine your objects, create controls, bind data
    • Simple UI script can truly data drive the presentation of the properties

Contents

For now this project is organized as a monolithic set of libraries and applications. All of our libraries compile to Windows DLLs. Thoughts on how we could organize our projects better can be found here.

Core Libraries

  • Common - Basic library code that provides simple features
  • Windows - A support library of windows-specific convenience functionality
  • Console - A color coded, verbosity throttled, remotable, outlining console printing library
  • Platform - A platform abstraction layer for threading, mutex, etc...
  • Profile - A basic broad-phase performance and memory profiler
  • IPC - Asynchronous message-based interprocess communcation via TCP or Named Pipe
  • Math - Very basic reference implementation of 3D math vector/matrix/rotations/colors
  • Debug - Win32/C++ exception handler/emailer and memory profiler
  • Config - A simple C++ config system that can be driven by XML files
  • AppUtils - Application structured startup/shutdown manager
  • FileSystem - File System abstraction layer and convenience code
  • SmartBuffer - Buffer objects that support pointers and serialization
  • SmartLoader - Fixed-memory loader for SmartBuffer files

Unique IDs

  • TUID - A simple 64-bit unique identifier
  • UniqueID - A utility library to make working with TUIDs and GUIDs easier

Revision Control

  • Perforce - Slim C++ Perforce abstraction layer
  • RCS - Revision Control System module for managing files under revision control

C++ Reflection

  • Reflect - An implementation of C++ reflection
  • Rebuild - A command line utility for files serialized with Reflect
  • Inspect - A widget engine for property-sheet style UI
  • InspectReflect - An interpreter for the Reflect C++ reflection format to drive Inspect UI
  • Reflector - A GUI utility for perusing the contents of files serialized with Reflect

Organization

Platform

Platform abstraction layer, just a thin wrapper around OS-constructs

  • Basic Types (u32, i32, etc...)
  • Asserts
  • Threads
  • Sockets

Each platform implementation is in a folder:

  • Windows
  • POSIX

Foundation

Modules:

  • Profile
  • Logging
  • File Path object
  • IPC systems
  • UID (GUID/64-bit TUID)
  • Math
  • Reflect
  • SmartBuffer
  • SmartLoader

Application

  • Inspect
  • InspectReflect
  • RCS
  • Perforce
  • UIToolKit
  • Undo
Retrieved from "http://nocturnal.insomniacgames.com/index.php/Helium"
Personal tools
Navigation
projects