Game Development: From beginner to journeyman

If you’re like me, when you’re coding things for a personal project, you won’t create any documentation. You’re the only one who will ever see or use this code, so why would you? Right? Let’s just add some comment here and there and it’ll be ok. Right? But sometime, somewhere along the road, you’ll wish you would have started documenting things.

Personnaly, I don’t like to write documentation. I prefer to write code and comments. However I know how important documentation is. That’s why I chose to start early with HexEngine and started to use Doxygen.

Doxygen extracts docomentation from the comments. Meaning that “all you have to do” to have some documentation for your projet is to adapt your comments style to doxygen comments style. Here’s an exemple of a function header.

/**
* Some function description
*
* @param someParam Some description for this param
* @param someOtherParam Some description for this other param
*
* @return Some explaination of what the function return
************************************************************/

To streamline my documentation process, here’s what I did:

1. Downloaded and Installed Doxygen windows binary.
2. Use the Doxygen GUI to create default.doxygen and save in $(SolutionDir)\docs\default.doxygen
3. VC++ 2005 Express > Tools > External Tools > Add

   Title: doxygen
   Command: C:\Program Files\doxygen\bin\doxygen.exe
   Arguments: $(SolutionDir)\docs\default.doxyfile
   Initial Directory: $(SolutionDir)
   Check Use output window

4. VC++ 2005 Express > Tools > Customize > Keyboard

   Show Commands Containing: Tools.ExternalCommand3 (You’ll have to find the correct external tool to assign
   Use new shortcut in: Global
   Press shortcut keys: CTRL+D
   Assign

And voila! Now when I press CTRL+D, doxygen runs according to the configuration in default.doxygen and generate my documentation.