Free Good Software for Different Development Purposes

[tolik]

(I guess this will continue a thread about MS Paint)
While lurking through the web spaces, I've found this thread:

http://forums.anandtech.com/messagev...&enterthread=y

Everybody will find something usefull there.

Being responsible for tracking every aspect in the projects, I've created similar list of software and when a new team member comes in and admins pre-install new computer for him, we also install all the extra software.

For some people who are worried about legal issues, this is a nice list of software replacements.

I would like to add "7-Zip" archiver to the list of "must have" free tools. It does easily handle a lot of archives plus gives superb compression outstanding RAR/ACE. The only disadvantage of using exactly 7z compression is speed (slow) and absence of crossplatform compatibility.



The only thing I haven't found for free is good compare/merge tool.
There's LCS which is the best out of free tools (in my opinion) http://www.ascotti.org/programming/lcs/lcs.htm
It's easily outstanded by CompareIt! (35$ I think)
http://www.grigsoft.com/wincmp.htm



Here are some more usefull things I personally use:
FAR (non-free) as File Manager (Norton Commander-style, very advanced) + Colorer (code highlight)
PSP5 (non-free) - somebody already mentioned this, it's very lightweight FAST and almost free, too bad it can't handle some images more than 2048x2048.
IrfanView (freeware) - view everything, do batch operations
Audacity (opensource) - for simple audio processing


Do you have any special tricky "free" tools which increase your productivity?

[ggambett]

The only thing I haven't found for free is good compare/merge tool.

Try WinMerge. Free, open source, for Windows but runs fine on WINE. Not sure if "good"

[Nemesis]

A good free 3d modelling tool: Wings 3D!
Wings is proof that the best things in life come free!

[tolik]

Try WinMerge. Free, open source, for Windows but runs fine on WINE. Not sure if "good"

WinMerge is worse than LCS as I know.
In any case, both software pieces don't allow you merge specific blocks of code and do inline editing.

[VaderSB]

SciTE text editor is very good for editing Lua scripts: http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html
Bonfire Studio for XML editing: http://nzworks.com/bonfire/index.asp

I've found both programs very helpful! The minor fault with Bonfire Studio is that it doesn't allow to edit nodes data in tree view mode.

[BongPig]

XnView is an excellent image/animation browser that can also convert images between a quite amazing range of formats.

[RedKnight]

Borland C/C++ 5.5.1
Still using it.

[keethrus]

-- free --
ZIP : QuickZip : http://www.quickzip.org/
Compiler : MinGW : http://www.mingw.org/
Editor : Scite : http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html
Memory Manager : Paul Nettle's mmgr : http://www.flipcode.com/cgi-bin/msg....m=askmid&id=-1
Anti-Spyware : Ad-Aware : http://www.lavasoftusa.com/
Anti-Spyware : Spybot : http://www.spybot.info/en/index.html

SDL : http://www.libsdl.org/
OpenGL : http://www.opengl.org/

-- not free, but cheap and good --
Image Editor : PSP7 : http://www.jasc.com/
Icon Editor : IconEdit2 : http://www.iconedit2.com/
Certs (SSL) : GeoCerts $99/year : http://www.geocerts.com/
Certs (Code Signing) : InstantSSL of Comodo $99/year : http://www.instantssl.com/

- Jeremiah

[serg3d]

How about making the thread stiky ?

[keethrus]

almost forgot...

Installer : NSIS : http://nsis.sourceforge.net/
Documentation could be better, but once you figure it out it's great, and free!

- Jeremiah

[Valen]

Another Installer: Inno Setup -- http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php
GUI for Inno Setup: ISTOOL -- http://www.istool.org/

IDE for PHP: Dev-PHP -- http://devphp.sourceforge.net/

[Dom]

MIDI sequencing:
Jazz++

A second vote here for Paint Shop Pro. Took me a while, but now I love it

Free Virus software:
AVG
Its not for commercial use, but for your personal home PC this is absolutely fantastic, especially if (like me) you get 101 friends & relatives bringing their virus riddled PCs to your house to fix for them

- Dom

[tolik]

XnView is an excellent image/animation browser that can also convert images between a quite amazing range of formats.

Unfortunately, this one is not free compared to IrfanView

XnView is provided as FREEWARE for private non-commercial or educational use (including non-profit organization)

Just a small note - I'm looking forward seeing your games on a big thing!

[Devman]

Hi guys,

Along these same lines, do you know of a good program for capturing video of your game then making an mpg/mov/avi from it so people can download it from your site?

Thanks!
Devman

[Mike Wiering]

Along these same lines, do you know of a good program for capturing video of your game then making an mpg/mov/avi from it so people can download it from your site?

I think you'll need two computers and a video cable. Then you can capture / edit it with http://www.virtualdub.org/. Never tried doing that though.

BTW: we should put all this stuff on a page in the wiki.

[tolik]

I remember having FRAPS ability to capture whatever:

FRAPS - fps, video capture, screen capture for DirectX & OpenGL!

www.fraps.com

Great thing, you will need a very powerfull computer though.

[Dom]

From the other thread, but really should be here:

AMD CodeAnalyst
Full CPU profiling for AMD chips (results will pretty much tie over, a major bottleneck for one CPU will probably be a bottleneck on another). like vTune, but completely free

- Dom