This book brings the insights of game professionals, DCC creators, hardware vendors, and current researchers together into a collection that focuses on the most underrepresented and critical part of game production: tools development. The first gems-type book dedicated to game tools, this volume focuses on practical, implementable tools for game development professionals. Topics range from asset tracking to improving remote version control performance to robust and efficient IO. Technical artists, as well as game play, audio, and graphics programmers will find new tools to improve work flow and help build games faster.

Reviews

The individual topics are very thoroughly and clearly explained with high-quality graphics. This is a good resource for experienced game designers seeking to optimize game development pipelines. Recommended.

—E. Bertozzi, CHOICE, November 2011

Game Development Tools offers the insights of game professionals, researchers, and more and provides guidelines, assessments of tools, and third-party applications for game developers. From building pipelines that work to GPU debugging and using in-game audio tools, this book offers discussions, color images, charts, and more and surveys commands, improvements, workflow, and more. No game developer’s reference library should be without this in-depth coverage for advanced developers.

—Midwest Book Review, August 2011

Contents

PHILOSOPHY AND METHODOLOGY

Taming the Beast: Managing Complexity in Game Build Pipelines, Fernando Navarro

Introduction

The Asset Build Pipeline

Dependencies

How to Determine Dependencies

How to Use Dependencies to Your Benefit

Advanced Techniques

Minimizing the Impact of Build Failures

Conclusions

Bibliography

Game Streaming: A Planned Approach, Jeffrey Aydelotte and Amir Ebrahimi

Introduction

Integrating Streaming from Day One

Passive Requests: The Art of Assetng

Bluer Skies

Conclusion

Bibliography

Workflow Improvement via Automatic Asset Tracking, Matt Greene and William Smith

Introduction

Historical Drawbacks of Manual Asset Tracking

Automatically Building an Asset Database Using the Xbox 360

Rapid Development of the MATT Tool Using Python

Automating In-Game Search with the BugViewer

Lessons Learned

Continuous Integration for Games, Steven Ramirez

Introduction

Build Pipelines: How Do They Work?

Using CCNet and More!

Conclusion

Bibliography

Persistence Management of Asset Metadata and Tags, Jaewon Jung

Introduction

Usual Metadata

Tags

Other Considerations

Conclusion

Bibliography

Real-Time Tool Communication, Alan Kimball

Introduction

Integrated Editors

Real-Time Communication

Properties

Robust Data

Null Checking

Copying Data

Complicate...