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 [...]
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 [...]
11.11Implementing 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 [...]
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 [...]
Some time ago, I decided to write a small C# “wizard” tool for enemy encounters and other level design patterns. The idea was to create pattern types, that designers could define with a small amount of data (different for each type of pattern) that could be exported into a much more complex xml format that could describe when [...]
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 [...]
This ongoing series delves more deeply into each of the “six reasons your game development tools suck” as argued in my very first post. Many game companies struggle with delivering tools quickly and cheaply. Money is always an issue wherever you go. After all, the bottom line is what keeps a company afloat and it’s employees [...]
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 [...]
07.20Indie Game Tools
A lot of what gets talked about in the “professional” game development sphere is the high-end high-priced tools or those that were developed internally by a dedicated programmer or team of programmers. Where does this leave the smaller groups that are popping up now, those that are developing primarily for the iPhone or the web? [...]