Promit's Ventspace
Fully Featured Custom Build Targets in Visual C++
A few days ago I was setting up a new resource build pipeline for our games, and wanted to integrate the build directly in Visual Studio. The goal was to include a resource manifest file in the project, and have them be fed to my compiler as part of the normal VC project build. Often the starting point for this is a simple command line entered as a Custom Build Event, but those are basically just dumb commands that don't follow the project files at all. The next step up from there is configuring a Custom Build Tool on the files in question. This works well once you have it set up, but there are distinct drawbacks. Each file is configured completely separately, and there's no way to share configuration. Adding the file to the project doesn't do anything unless you go in and set several properties for the build tool. There has to be a better way.
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This is the result of several years of work and testing now, and I’m happy to finally publish it for everyone. All of the text, design, and artwork in this post are under the Creative Commons CC-BY license. That is, you are allowed to modify and share as you wish as long as I, Promit Roy, am credited as the origin. I also politely ask, but do not legally require, that you let me know if you build or modify these and share your own images.