If you are free at 6:00 PM on Thursday come out for some drinks during GDC. We will be at The Thirsty Bear Brewing Company.

First off, our official Tools SIG gathering at GDC is on Thursday 1:30 to 2:30 at the IGDA booth.

Everyone should also show up to at least one of John Walker’s excellent roundtables. I find them useful to see what approaches people are using in their pipelines and share lessons learned from the past year.

Technical Issues in Tools Development
John Walker (Applied Signal Technology)
Thursday 4:30- 5:30 Room 120, North Hall
Friday 1:30- 2:30 Room 120, North Hall
Saturday 9:00-10:00 Room 120, North Hall

Lectures:

Data is a Four-Letter Word
Paul Du Bois (Double Fine) and Henry Goffin (Double Fine)
Thursday 10:30-11:30 Room 131, North Hall

Building Blocks: Artist Driven Procedural Buildings
James Golding (Epic Games)
Thursday 10:30-11:30 Room 130, North Hall

The Asset Pipeline for Just Cause 2: Lessons Learned
Mathias Westerdahl (Avalanche Studios)
Thursday 3:00- 4:00 Room 131, North Hall

Introduction to Maya API Programming and Custom UI
Kristine Middlemiss (Autodesk Inc.)
Thursday 4:30- 5:30 Room 300, South Hall

Collada – Featuring WebGL
Mark Barnes (Khronos Group)
Friday 1:30- 2:30 Room 123, North Hall

The Role of Middleware in Game Development: Today and Tomorrow
Martin Walker (Artificial Mind & Movement), Kevin Scharff (Spark Unlimited), Matthew Shaw (Electronic Arts, Mythic Entertainment Studio) and Mark Stevens (Autodesk)
Friday 4:30- 5:30 Room 123, North Hall

So please take a moment to visit the site and respond to the poll in this post to let us know when you’d most like to gather, and we’ll see you at GDC!

So now I’d like to take some time to talk about official SIG business, specifically what came up at the round table.  The thing I heard more than anything else (other than the fact that the title of the talk should have had “Administrative” in the title to make it obvious the talk was administrative in nature), was that in order for us to keep the Tools SIG relevant growing, we need to provide tangible benifits to the Tools community.  I think we’ve started down that path already with the Toolsmiths and the mailing list, but we need a lot more.

At the round table, we started talking about things we can offer in the new year, not only to increase usefullness to our members, but to serve as outreach to bring in more members to the SIG and the IGDA.  These include

• A survey on the current state of tools in the industry (similar to Dan’s survery and Mark’s survery)
• A listing of tools resources (which we have, but will be extended and brought up to date this year),
• Educational outreach, both in terms of getting more schools involved in teaching tools programming, and getting more schools involved in tools research and open source contribution.

Over the next few years, we’d also like to look into providing other benefits, including:

• Best practices papers on tools development and tools usage
• Build best practices
• A summit at GDC dedicated entirely to tools issues

What we need from all of you, in the mean time, is input into what projects you would be most interested in seeing started, and which ones you would help volunteer to complete.  So, probably over the next week, I will be running some surverys / polls through the blog to try to find out what is most important to our readership, and from there, hopefully we can provide the community with exactly what they need.  If you have any projects that you would like to see the Tools SIG accomplish this year or over the next few years, please do not hesitate to add them to the list, and I will add them to the poll.

The focal points of the lecture were:

• Indirection of file locations using unique IDs instead of string paths to allow files to be moved around efficiently
• Organizing data within asset definitions using a modular attribute system, and classifying hard engine types based on those attributes
• Our flexible data-driven properties systems (Nocturnal’s Inspect) coupled with C++ reflection (Nocturnal’s Reflect) providing extremely flexible and highly extensible property editing
• Sharing general processed data results using signature-based cache files to remove processed data from revision control
• Perforce for code and assets storage, branching for milestones, and the virtues of less live assets coupled with our continuous integration system for keeping users working reliably through an increment of content creation

The slides are available from GDC’s website here.  If anyone has any questions I will be happy to handle them as best I can in the comments.

Happy hunting (bug hunting), folks

REPEAT! THE TIME IN THE GDC PROGRAM FOR THE TOOLS SIG ROUND TABLE MAY BE WRONG!!! And will be corrected in the addendum. THE TIME ON THE WEB SITE IS CORRECT!!!

I encourage all of our readers that will be attending GDC to attend this round table. The discussions we have there will (hopefully) set the tone for SIG business for the coming year and get us all on the “same page” in terms of where we want the SIG to go, what projects we want to do, and how we plan to move those projects forward. This includes new blog authors and features. If you are unable to make the roundtable, but would like to suggest a topic of discussion or volunteer to be part of a project, please feel free to comment.

As a note, I will be sure to post notes of the round table (and other tools related talks) on our wiki page after GDC.

Hope to see everyone there!

Jay responds to my post on Ad-Hoc Tools Teams saying:

I want to argue that an ad-hoc tool team is ok provided the following:

* It is always good when an idea for a tools comes from the people who are going to use it.
* Even better, if they can come up quickly with an early implementation that is functional and effective.
* The official tool team can be shown what the tool does and why it is needed. Then the early implementation done by the ad-hoc team can be promoted to a fully featured tool with the support of the official tool team.
* The ad-hoc tool team understands that its main goal is to respond to a critical need (not to replace the official tool team if there is one).

I agree that giving the developers that are going to use the tools the ability to prototype them is an excellent idea.  An official tools team should never take the place of developers doing prototypes.  However, I think Jay gets to the heart of his issue with his last bullet point:  you can’t have your ad-hoc teams be support team, or worse the only tools team available to you.  Prototyping is always important, but once the prototype is proven, move it over to a team that can actually support the “product.”

On the same post, Ben asked the question:

[W]hat would you say are the main problems with permanent tools teams? Lots of people have had really bad experiences with centralized tools teams, especially at big companies.

I think this comes down to a cultural issue, and I see that it’s going to need a full post.  In general though, I think the biggest problem that comes along with centralized tools teams occurs because they’re not considered part of the larger team.  This hurst both your tools team (which feals left out) and your main team (which feals the tools team is aloof and unresponsive / uncooperative).  Always have members of your tools teams in close contact with the rest of the team (on the same scrums if you’re doing agile).  The helps bridge the gap between tools team and dev team, and will result in better communication and better tools.

Jay also posts another reason to consider contracting out custom tools developmen:

Often, developers need a tool right now to help with the game they are working on. Then, they move on to another project and the tool may be lost. However a contractor can anticipate the tools evolution with regard to game play, competitive requirements and technology progress.

Lastly, David asks about GDC:

Can you guys make an effort to grab any resources (slides) from these talks and post them here?

In certain cases, yes.  I’m sure Geoff will post the slides to his talk, and I will certainly post the notes from the Tools SIG Roundtable, but everything else is up in the air.  I will ask that, if you go to any of these talks, please send me your notes and I will be happy to post them!

First, as happens every year, John Walker will be hosting his usual Technical Issues in Tools Development roundtable. John is an excellent roundtable moderator, and the discussions are always excellent. This year, John has smartly put in specialized topics for discussion each day, so you can know which day to go if you’re specifically interested in one topic. If you’re interested, you can view prior year’s notes on these round tables at the IGDA Tools SIG wiki, located here.

In addition to John’s roundtable, Jeff Hanna will be hosting the Technical Artist Roundtable, which very frequently talks about tools and tools design for artists.

On the lecture front, our own Geoff Evans will be giving a lecture on The Tech Behind the Tools of Insomniac Games. Geoff has already posted a little bit about this, and I’m sure the talk will be excellent.

Other talks that looked potentially interesting to tools developers:

• When Good AI Goes Bad: Tools, Techniques, and Strategies for Testing and Debugging AI
• Two pipeline talks from Gears of War 2, one on the cinematic pipeline and the other on the character pipeline.
• A talk on test tools called Test Tools Potluck, which won’t talk about development of the tools, but may give you a good idea of how tools can improve your testing process.

Lastly, but most importantly, I will be hosting a round table specifically to talk about the Tools SIG and our plans for the next year. I really want to encourage everyone to come out to this round table so we can get ideas and focus our initiatives over the next year. I also want to get an idea of who would be interested in helping with the many ideas for white papers and community contributions that have been floated on our discussion list in years past. So, if you’re free during that time, please make an effort to come out and support the SIG.

Anyone else know of any tools talks happening at GDC this year? Specifically talks on build process? They seem to be very lacking this year.