Author: Jonah McConnell

Cleaning a project taking too long? Feel like you're having to pay far too much attention to menial tasks? Well, I definitely did, so I decided to automate it... Only to fall into the infamous "half an hour to automate a five-minute task" trap. Diving into writing a script in a language I have very little experience in was not the wisest choice, however, I believe there will still be great benefits to reap from it. 

The script grew fairly organically over the week. It especially grew when I was sick and didn't have the energy or brain power to work on the project itself. I decided to let my inner script-kiddy have a field day and slowly work through this while I rested. The result is a highly modular script that uses the same underlying tools we use when recreating our project. Rather than having to slowly watch as each step completes to clean the project, regenerate the project files, build the editor, launch the editor, and re-setup your settings, this script does it all automatically.

One of the things I tried to keep in mind was the simplicity of the original script. I talked with the developer who made the original script I based this on, who brought up a very good point that his script keeps simplicity since it was originally meant for designers. While a different mindset, it is still a valid critique I tried to incorporate as I continued to grow the script. I tried to ensure that everything could work with minimal input from the user. The current system sees the user input where Unreal is installed, and what version of Visual Studio they use. I'd like to make a version that does away with the need to use Visual Studio's tools, but that is a much bigger investment. Some smaller investments include making opening Visual Studio optional, which I've already done, and adding error handling for invalid settings in the properties file.

Having watched a lot of people use the script over the course of the week (after much pestering and pleading on my part that it would work), I noticed that everyone immediately tried to run the script once it was in place. This got me thinking that if I devote more time to this, I'd like to have it handle if nothing has been set in the properties file and/or handle when it can't find files by stopping execution and displaying a warning. However, that goes well beyond the time appropriate for such a tool at the moment as it's used primarily by those in physical proximity to me, so error handling can be swiftly taken care of by myself. That said, in the spirit of most of my tools, I want to make it usable for non-programmers, so I would like to improve on the script in the future to make it less daunting to use.