Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
couldn
d have a hard time making our deadlines. We
steeled ourselves with resolve, and armed with our charts and graphs and grim schedule predictions, we
entered the conference room. Two hours later, we all walked out of the room completely convinced that
Richard was right, a seamless map was the way to go. I wish I knew how he does that!
'
t convince Richard to use a simpler world design we
'
Bits and Pieces
Games are built from more than code. Go find any PC game you bought recently and
take a look at the directory where you installed it. You ' ll find the expected EXE and
DLL files, with a few INIs or TXT files, too. You
'
ll also find gigabytes of other stuff
with file extensions that don
ve ever seen.
These other files hold art, models, levels, sounds, music, scripts, and game data.
This data didn ' t just fall out of the ether. Every texture was once a PNG or TIF file.
Every sound was once a WAV, probably converted to MP3 or OGG. Each model and
game level had its own file, too, perhaps stored in a 3ds Max file. Even a small game
will collect hundreds, if not thousands, of these bits and pieces, all of which need to
be catalogued and organized into a manageable database of sorts.
Very few software projects share this problem. The only thing that comes close is a
website, and there just aren
'
t necessarily map to any program you
'
'
t that many assets. After all, they have to get sent over
the Internet, so there can ' t be that many certainly not enough to fill up a Blu-ray
disc, and a compressed one at that.
Losing Files Is Easier Than You Think
Logistically, these things can be a nightmare to manage. I worked on a
project where an artist wiped every file he
d worked on without even
knowing it. Art files would get changed on the network, but wouldn
'
t
get copied into the build, or even worse, the artist would change the
name of a file, and it would get lost forever. When you have thousands
of files to look though, it
'
s sometimes easier to just repaint it. Luckily,
there are tools like Perforce, Subversion, or Git to help manage this
problem. The situation is certainly better than when I started, where I
think our best file management scheme was a pad of paper.
'
That
s a Feature
Actual bug: I was walking along and the trees turned into shovels and my character
turned into a pair of boots and then the game crashed.
You certainly won
'
s Not a Bug
That
'
t see a bug report like that working on a database application.
Seriously, some of these reports convince you beyond any shadow of doubt that the
'
 
 
 
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search