Re: Question about development of prototyping tools.

I agree, good investment in tools is really the key.
The best projects I’ve worked on are where there has been significant investment in making the tools pipeline very efficient, it saves everyone time and lets them get on with the actually interesting stuff.

The best studios are especially good at sharing tech between projects, if you can take some tools/basic libraries and drop them into your project with relative ease, you reduce the amount of work you have to do significantly. Most things have been written by someone else before, so why go through the hassle of doing it again if you can just take it from another project.

Joe Hegarty | Network Programmer | Mass Effect | BioWare Montreal <http://www.bioware.com/> | [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>


From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jon Watte
Sent: Sunday, April 24, 2011 12:56 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Sweng-Gamedev] Question about development of prototyping tools.

Actually, I think all the really successful companies have pretty decent investments in tools -- whether it be in-house, or through licensing engines with known-good tools.

There was an interesting presentation at this year's GDC where some EA people showed how they could mock up levels very quickly using Inkscape, and render SVG to 3D "white box" levels. IIRC, they used this for prototyping levels for Dark Spore.

Sincerely,

jw


--
Americans might object: there is no way we would sacrifice our living standards for the benefit of people in the rest of the world. Nevertheless, whether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our present rates are unsustainable.


On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 10:26 PM, Juan Linietsky <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I'm not sure if this is a common quesiton in the list, but I think tool programming is a very overlooked issue of software engineering in game development.
So my question is, since many here have tremendous experience in the game industry and worked on huge projects, what kind of tools do software engineers supply to game or level designers so they can, for example, prototype a game stage before, say, 3D artists start working on a final version?

In more depth, games like Halo, God of War or Mario Galaxy for example have really complex scenarios, so complex that a height map or grid map editors do not suffice for prototyping. I can imagine that before 3D artists can start working on the final art, a simpler looking prototype must be created. I also can imagine that creating such prototypes need constant adjusting on the fly (a cliff may be too high, a room to small to fit the enemies, a target out of shooting range), so either special tools for editing stages are created or special plugins for integrating with, say, maya are needed? Also, is it common that game or level designers know how to work with 3D apps for stage design? or do engineers have to create special tools for them? If so what kind of tools?

Cheers!

Juan Linietsky




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