Digital Dave

Musings on projects, business and life.

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Sep 3, 2008

The Semester Notes

Aside from the money issues i’ve been having due to some financial aid not hitting my account, things are rolling along well.

In one of my classes I have the requirement of building either a game prototype, engine, tool, or building a thorough design document for the final project.  I’m leaning toward building a tool suite of some sort, but I’m having a mental block on what sort of tools are needed for game development — beyond the obvious, a 2D/3D map editor.

If you have some ideas of tools are needed for game development, feel free to reply so I can debate on if I should pursue it.

Besides this class, I have another CIS course that is dishing out a pretty serious test tomorrow.  It’s not a good feeling when your instructors are even confused by the material that they are reviewing. We’ll have to see how it goes.

My creative writing class is going really well.  Learning about all kinds of things and the professor is doing a pretty good job so far.  I need to write 2 stories for this class, which I’ve already done.  They are a bit long, so I’ll either need to consider cutting them down or writing something completely different.

Category: academic

Tagged:

  • http://www.jeffongames.com Jeff Ward

    Hey Dave!

    Darius directed me here to potentially answer your question, and I’m going to answer it in spades, so get ready. This will cover everything from low level to high level game development, including small and large tools that would be used in any number of situations. In some cases, I’ve provided examples.

    – Art –
    Texture Manipulation: Beyond Photoshop / GIMP, some editors are made with the game industry in mind and allow you to edit bump mapping and material properties and save out textures you need. ZBrush is a good example.
    Visual Diff tools: There’s a visual diff tool for textures that’s part of SVN I believe, but ones that can do visual diffs on models would be awesome. This is what we call a “hard problem” as things like Maya and Max will completely reorder verts on you for performance reasons.
    Animation Viewers / Editors: Plugins for Max / Maya or even Blender that allow you to do skinned animation. If they take into account physics, so much the better. Even better, if they can generate animations based on physics input. Another “hard problem”
    Current Game State tools: Be able to get information from a running game about what textures are being used, how much space they take up, who’s using them. This requires a lot of knowledge about the game engine you’d integrate with.

    – Code –
    Log manipulators; You can only go so far with OutputDebugString and Console.WriteLine. Better to have that text go, encoded, to a tool, which can filter it via user input. While the game is running is always good.
    Current Game State tools: Same as art, but for code. Current memory usage, speed information, etc. Again, you need to know a ton about what you’re integrating with.

    – Editors –
    Plugin based editors: This is getting easier and easier to develop. Basically, a game editor that can have any number of components loaded into it, and save out the information stored in each component for use in a game. Not an easy task, but possible… if you do it right.
    Of course 3D / 2D level editors, but include collision, trigger, and scripting information.
    Editors that integrate with running games are also awesome.

    – Bugs / Metrics –
    Components that let you automatically submit bugs to tracking tools.
    Additions to level editors that let you visualize bugs as you edit levels.

    All I can think of off the top of my head. I can give you more detail about any one of those if you want, and I’ll try to think of more, simpler tools for you and maybe post again.

  • http://www.david-mcgraw.com david.mcgraw

    I can’t even thank you enough for writing that. I will have to send you an e-mail, too. Thanks a lot.

David McGraw

Founder of iGotIt Games. Trader. Runner. Warrior. Motivator.