Game Development Tools

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.

Auteur

Marwan Ansari is a software engineer for a Chicago-based games company. He has a B.S. in computer science and mathematics from DePaul University and an M.S. from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has 15 years of experience in console games development, video drivers and demos, military simulators, and application and tools development. He specializes in 3D computer graphics and has been published in ShaderX^2 and Game Programming Gems 4.

Contenu

PHILOSOPHY AND METHODOLOGY: Taming the Beast: Managing Complexity in Game Build Pipelines. Game Streaming: A Planned Approach. Workflow Improvement via Automatic Asset Tracking. Continuous Integration for Games. Persistence Management of Asset Metadata and Tags. Real-Time Tool Communication. Robust File I/O. BUILDABLE TOOLS: Real-Time Constructive Solid Geometry. A COLLADA Toolbox. Shape-Preserving Terrain Decimation and Associated Tools. In-Game Audio Debugging Tools. Pragmatic XML Use in Tools. Low Coupling Command System. Object-Oriented Data. Improving Remote Perforce Usage. THIRD-PARTY TOOLS: Vector Displacement in the Sculpting Workflow. Optimizing a Task-Based Game Engine. Efficient Texture Creation with Genetica. Reducing Video Game Creation Effort with Eberos GML2D. YAML for C++: Applied Data-Driven Design. GPU Debugging and Profiling with NVIDIA Parallel Nsight. FBX Games Development Tools. Index.