Sharpmake is a solution to generate Visual Studio project files for C++, C#, VSIX, as well as FastBuild bff files, and linux makefiles.
It is similar to Premake, but in C#. Originally developed on Assassin's Creed 3 in 2011, Sharpmake is today used by most projects at Ubisoft.
The best place for the Sharpmake documentation is the wiki on GitHub. The Sharpmake source code also comes with samples that you can study.
Building Sharpmake is quite straightforward. Clone the repo on GitHub, open the solution in Visual Studio and build the solution in Release. The binaries will be found in the Sharpmake.Application/bin/Release. You can run the deploy_binaries.py script to automatically fetch the binaries and copy them in a Binaries folder.
Sharpmake originally had support for game consoles, but Ubisoft pulled it out because those could not be open sourced. Sharpmake now has an extension system that allows support for these consoles to be added back at runtime.
If you need support for these platforms and are an authorized developper, you can contact the SDK provider to get platform extension for Sharpmake.
We will only accept merge requests that pass every tests. The unit tests are written with NUnit and the regression tests are ran by comparing the samples' output with a reference output. You can run the regression_tests.py script after having built the solution in Visual Studio to run the regression tests.
Because the regression tests just do a direct comparison with the output, it is possible to get a false negative after having done a good change. In that case, please update the tests so they match the output after your change. You can run the UpdateSamplesOutput.bat and UpdateSharpmakeProjects.bat batch files to automatically overwrite the reference output files.
Naturally, we also recommend that you put your own tests after fixing a bug or adding a feature to help us avoid regressions.
If you want to add support for an additional platform, please make sure that the platform is open and that you are not breaking your NDA. Ubisoft has not published platform support for most video game consoles for that exact reason. We will not accept merge requests for new platforms that are not completely open for developmemt.