Persistence Management of Asset Metadata and Tags - Game Development Tools - page 58

levels/!art/asset_zoo/models/crytek kiev.cgf
levels/!art/asset_zoo/models/doors.cgf
levels/!art/asset_zoo/models/down town.cgf
levels/!art/asset_zoo/models/grand central station.cgf
levels/!art/asset_zoo/models/group_battery_park.cgf
Listing 5.3. Atagfileexample.
associated tags just because of that. Also, tags can be universally applied across
all asset types. On the querying side, a tag-key database will be more useful than
an asset-key database, in most cases. Furthermore, it is useful to distinguish tags
for local use only from shared tags. Therefore, tags will be saved by the tag it-
self as a key instead of the asset name key, as in the case of intrinsic metadata.
Specifically, each tag and its associated asset list will be saved as a separate file
(in this case, since just a plain list of assets having that tag is all the information
to be saved, no elaborate file format is required) in a designated tag folder (see
Listing 5.3).
Considerations for the user interface. In the case of the tag management UI, in
accordance with the general scheme above, it's recommended to provide an explicit
creationanddeletionUIfortags(see Figure5.2 ) ),ratherthananimplicittag
management(see Figure5.3 ) ).Here,Ibytheimplicitwaymean,providinga
textinputUIfortagspereachassetanddetectingthetagcreation/deletionevents
there from the user input. The explicit way matches better with the internal scheme
above and also has advantages in handling shared tags.
Figure 5.2. Explicit tag management UI from Evernote.com.