XML is the de facto standard for game data, at least for intermediate data. Just about every programming language commonly in use has robust libraries for reading, writing and manipulating XML data. There are also some interesting general purpose tools for XML that not many people know very well such as XSLT (which I’ve discussed [...]
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 [...]
I was recently invited to do a talk at Game Forum Germany, and the talk I gave was called “Data Driven Is Half the Battle.” I’ve made the slides available on my website if you would like to take a look. The purpose of the talk was to show that just making game systems data [...]
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. [...]
11.11Implementing Undo
One of the most basic of usability features, undo/redo is also fairly straightforward to implement. Most engineers will tell you that undo functionality needs to be planned for from the beginning of a project. So why is it still just an afterthought for most game development tools? We recently had to implement an undo solution [...]
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 [...]
This ongoing series delves more deeply into each of the “six reasons your game development tools suck” as argued in my very first post. At one company I worked for, we wrote our level design tool, as well as a cinematic tool on top of Maya. The idea was that Maya already had an interface [...]
This ongoing series delves more deeply into each of the “six reasons your game development tools suck” as argued in my very first post. Two of the most important concepts in software engineering are abstraction and modularity. Abstraction allows us to categorize problems and write general code to handle all problems within a group, while modularity [...]
Visual Studio fan or not, its ubiquity in game development means that sooner or later you will have to deal with its shortcomings. It is the de facto standard IDE for the de facto standard game development operating system. One of its weak points is the project file property editor. While it does wrangle compile [...]