Lately I am settling into a new job over at Neversoft. There are some awesome folks over there, and I am really enjoying it so far. Along with starting a new job comes learning a completely different codebase. This can be especially arduous for tools folks since tools code typically sits atop a mountain of [...]
One of the things I’d like the Toolsmiths to be is a place where we can discuss our common problems, and hopefully come up with common solutions. Toward that end, I’m starting a new series on the blog called “Common Problems”, and I’m kicking it off with something that I’ve seen as a common problem [...]
11.16Premake 4.3
Industrious One has announced availability of next major release of its excellent build configuration tool, Premake. The announcement and download link is here. Premake is a BSD open source, lua based, cross-platform IDE project and Makefile generation tool. Premake lets you define common settings on the solution level and add configuration-specific settings based on wildcards. [...]
08.23CoApp
One open source project I have been keeping an eye on is CoApp. Microsoft is currently paying a Garrett Serack to develop an open binary and source package management platform for Windows. The goal is provide the ease of use and flexibility of linux-style package management on the Windows platform. This is exactly what Microsoft [...]
As many of you know, I’m a stickler for a good build process. In my mind, a any game team can loose a lot of time and money just waiting for their builds to complete, or waiting for a build that won’t crash every 10 minutes. This is mitigated somewhat by programming processes like unit [...]
Over the past few years, cloud computing has become the next big thing for enterprise software. The ability to easily scale resources to meet the needs of the end users cheaply is very attractive. Amazon, Sun, Google and now Mictrosoft (among others) are all offering cloud computing solutions. I’ve recently been playing around with the AWS (Amazon [...]
Developing in-house game tools presents a myriad of debugging issues. You can’t always nail down bugs to reproducible steps (if you even have QA resources to concentrate on that). Frequently content creators will complain about rare issues that force them to reboot the tools or use bizarre workarounds then things go wrong. Remote debugging works [...]
Thanks to everyone that was able to show up to my talk at GDC. I thought it went very well, and I got a lot of good questions and feedback after the lecture. The focal points of the lecture were: Indirection of file locations using unique IDs instead of string paths to allow files to [...]
01.28The Build Pipeline
Hi everyone, I’m Jeff Ward, Lead Architect and co-founder of metrics middleware company Orbus Gameworks, located in Cambridge, MA. Although I’m sure I’ll have a change to talk about the use of metrics as an extension of your tools at some point, for my first post, I wanted to talk about something near and dear [...]