This ongoing series delves more deeply into each of the “six reasons your game development tools suck” as argued in my very first post. A lot of clutter in a tool’s user interface can be very confusing. When a user needs to scan the toolbar for a specific button to do something very routine, that’s [...]
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 [...]
A while back, after a talk I gave at our local IGDA chapter meeting, I got an email from a recruiter at a local game development company. He was looking to fill a position for a tools engineer and wanted to know what he needed to look for. I never got back to him (sorry!) [...]
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 [...]
Many of the available source control solutions out there are great if you are a programmer. Both Subversion and Perforce adequately handle the storing of assets, but neither is very friendly to creative types. How often do “bad checkins” happen because some new and obscure file created on the user’s machine didn’t get added? Or maybe [...]
07.22Doing The Math
In response to Dan’s post on when to rewrite vs. refactor existing tools, I wanted to point out what I felt was a key section: Now comes the real decision point though. Does a rewrite make sense for the current project or should it be put off for a later time? If you’re in beta, rewriting a [...]
I got an email recently asking for my advice on bug fixing vs. completly rewriting a broken tool. The email described the complexity of the tool in question being caused by the addition of new features on top of an already shakey starting point. This sort of problem always comes down to time and money. The perception among [...]
One of the key issues in game tools development is how to improve asset turnaround time; how long is it between when an artist, programmer, writer, level designer, sound designer, or even an executive makes a change before the results can be seen in game or at least in engine. More importantly, how many other [...]