1. Software development environments

This section describes how you can setup your software development environment. This includes setting up a directory structure to organize the storage of your software projects. The next step involves setting up an integrated development environment (IDE). This is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools and a debugger.

1.1. Game Engines and IDEs

Below are a list of development environments that you can use for software development. Supports Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems. Please note that Linux support is new and is a bit buggy as of September 2021.

• Unity
• PyCharm
• Visual Studio Code
• Command line terminal + text editor

1.2. Why containers are not used?

Important

As part of best practices in software development, it is important that your software environment is replicable. To achieve this, industry standard is to run your IDE within a container or a online-based IDE. Unfortunately none of the Game Engines officially support running inside a container(as of September 2021). The next best solution is to replicate the development environment using the exact same version of the software components.

Using a higher or lower version than the recommended software might lead to incompatibility issues.

The instructions for downloading a specific version can be found in the software development container documentation.