I strongly encourage game developers to archive their dev environment

twitter.com

25 points·tosh··4 comments

>I knew a guy that would purchase a laptop at the end of a project, set it up with everything needed to compile their project. Clone the project onto and then label the lid with the project and stick it in a bookshelf.

>Many of the games I wrote for <AAA company> are archived as PC's in a storage facility, ready to go again at a moment's notice.

This is brilliant. It may sound stupid at first but the simplicity of this and it will work so much better than VM option.

I don't know.. I'd be very worried about bitrot, so I would at least want to clone that hard drive a few times. Then spread those copies so that a leak in a basement doesn't take it out. At that point, why not just make a VM which you can move everywhere? I still have VM's that are 10-12 yeras old that I can still boot.

> I'd be very worried about bitrot

That is actually a fair point although I have NAND / SSD storage in mind. I have been wondering what happen to those in terms of long term storage and always failed to find an answer.

We really need to fix this long term storage problem.

Al Lowe knew that 40 years ago :)

Behind the Scenes w/ SIERRA On-Line's Al Lowe (Leisure Suit Larry, King's Quest, etc) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9DZ3LWWsRE

Just look at those neat boxes with archived build environments for all of his games.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com