Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
wxPython application served a variety of purposes that assisted the MATT tool
during everyday development, while also being available to the quality-assurance
team with no developer modification.
A growing concern was tool-overload; that the sheer number and complexity
of development tools would itself become a detriment to productivity. In or-
der to preemptively combat this issue, we registered a custom hyperlink protocol
(bugviewer://) within Windows that would provide one-click connections between
each of the interrelated applications that now constituted our asset tracking suite.
The BugViewer could generate a hyperlink that users could share that would im-
mediately return whoever followed it back to the in-game location entry in the
BugViewer interface, which could then in turn automatically teleport the user to
that same location in the level editor or game.
Once this hyperlink system was complete, we had effectively removed the need
for anyone to manually look for anything in the game or in the asset library that had
already been located by someone else. Users could play the game on their Xbox 360
consoles and execute a command at any time that would save a screenshot, position
information and debugging values to an XML file on the Xbox 360 hard drive. This
allowed users to tag' game locations with metadata directly on their development
consoles, with or without a connected PC. The BugViewer could later retrieve
these files from any networked Xbox 360 consoles and submit them along with any
associated annotations to a shared repository in Perforce. This would automatically
maintain all location information in a machine-readable and searchable format. The
BugViewer also provided users with an interactive map to browse and search all
the communal “tags” that were ever made. Users could click a single button to
instantly teleport the game camera or level editor camera to revisit that exact
location to see what that location currently looked like in the game.
One unexpected result of this system was that developers began using the
BugViewer for more than just calling out problematic locations in the game. For
example, art directors sent hyperlinks to annotated game locations via email to
describe revision and iteration requests, while others saved local hyperlinks to com-
mon locations purely for convenience. Clicking a hyperlink would immediately open
the relevant location in the BugViewer, which acted as a hub with one-click options
to instantly teleport the user to that same location in the level editor, the actual
game, or to any scheduled tasks related to that location in Hansoft (our schedule
management software). Any asset in question was also immediately available for
scrutiny in the MATT tool, which still ran separately.
3.6 Lessons Learned
At the time of writing, post-production of Volition's
Red Faction: Armageddon
is underway, and the asset-tracking tools described in this article are still being
maintained, updated, and planned for future revision. However it is quite possible
