Sharpmake
Introduction
Sharpmake is a generator for Visual Studio projects and solutions. It is
similar to CMake and Premake, but it is designed for speed and
scale. Sharpmake has been used at Ubisoft to generate several thousands
of vcxproj, csproj and sln files in a matter of seconds, and each of
these projects can support a large number of Visual Studio configurations as
well.
That makes Sharpmake ideal for the development of multi-platform games, where
the number of platforms, the different levels of optimization, the multiple
rendering APIs on PC and the level editor can quickly multiply the number of
configurations a given code base must support. Sharpmake generates all those
configurations at once, very quickly. Thus, it becomes trivial to generate
and regenerate the entire project.
Sharpmake uses C# for scripting, hence the name. That means that you can edit
your scripts in Visual Studio (or Visual Studio Code) and have a complete
IntelliSense programming experience.
Sharpmake can also generate makefiles and Xcode projects, but it is currently
only available for Windows. With .NET Core and .NET Standard though, it is
our hope that it will eventually cross the platform barrier. In the
meanwhile, you may have luck using it with Mono.
Sharpmake was developed internally at Ubisoft for Assassin's Creed 3 in 2011.
After experimenting with the other existing tools, it became clear that none
of these solutions were performant enough to generate the number of
configurations needed (at least not in a trivial way) and that a custom
generator was needed.
Documentation
The best place for the Sharpmake documentation is the
wiki on GitHub. The Sharpmake
source code also comes with samples that you can study.
Building Sharpmake
Building Sharpmake is quite straightforward. Clone the repo on GitHub, open the
solution in Visual Studio and build the solution in Release. The binaries
will be found in the Sharpmake.Application/bin/Release. You can run the
deploy_binaries.py script to automatically fetch the binaries and copy them
in a Binaries folder.
More Platforms
Sharpmake originally had support for game consoles, but Ubisoft pulled it out
because those could not be open sourced. Sharpmake now has an extension system
that allows support for these consoles to be added back at runtime.
If you need support for these platforms and are an authorized developer, you
can contact the SDK provider to get platform extension for Sharpmake.
Contributing
Tests
We will only accept merge requests that pass every tests. The unit tests are
written with NUnit and the regression tests are ran by comparing the samples'
output with a reference output. You can run the regression_tests.py script
after having built the solution in Visual Studio to run the regression tests.
Because the regression tests just do a direct comparison with the output, it is
possible to get a false negative after having done a good change. In that case,
please update the tests so they match the output after your change. You can run
the UpdateSamplesOutput.bat and UpdateSharpmakeProjects.bat batch files to
automatically overwrite the reference output files.
Naturally, we also recommend that you put your own tests after fixing a bug or
adding a feature to help us avoid regressions.
Functional tests are generating test projects and building them to test
functionality
used toolset for functional tests:
tools\FastBuild\FBuild.exe - v0.97. http://www.fastbuild.org
Additional Platforms
If you want to add support for an additional platform, please make sure that
the platform is open and that you are not breaking your NDA. Ubisoft has not
published platform support for most video game consoles for that exact reason.
We will not accept merge requests for new platforms that are not completely
open for development.