Premake 4.3

Industrious One has announced availability of next major release of its excellent build configuration tool, Premake. The announcement and download link is here. Premake is a BSD open source, lua based, cross-platform IDE project and Makefile generation tool.

Premake lets you define common settings on the solution level and add configuration-specific settings based on wildcards. For example, I can define WIN32 as a common preprocessor variable, but set UNICODE to be defined only for configurations whose name matches “*Unicode”. Premake can be a huge benefit to managing the combinatorial explosion of settings for build configuration (ASCII/Unicode, Debug/Release, Win32/x64).

Premake has support for generating PS3 and Xbox360 visual studio solutions, but version 4.3 is still missing a couple of things that game developers need to handle every scenario. These include generation of projects that need to call out to make, and projects with custom build steps (for shaders, assembly, and code-generating scripts). Support for this is planned for subsequent releases, and there are already some patches to evaluate. Premake itself is simple to download and build (its hosted on BitBucket). If you do decide to take the plunge and switch to Premake, you will find starkos (the project runner) to be very courteous and responsive.

If you deal with build configuration at your studio, you owe it to yourself to evaluate Premake. It has vastly simplified managing our builds at WMD.