Fabrice Robinet

Game Development Tool Essentials

Game Development Tool Essentialsprovides must-have tips and tricks from industry professionals for strengthening and streamlining your game tools pipeline. Everyone knows the game tools pipeline is important, but in the current environment of shrinking budgets and increased time pressure, developers often have to settle for inefficient, ad hoc, messy pipelines.This unique book will break you out of that cycle. The practical, expert insights contained within will enable you to work faster and more efficiently, so you can spend more time making cool things.Game Development Tool Essentialspools the knowledge and experience of working developers over four critical aspects of the game tools pipeline: asset and data management, geometry and models, Web tools, and programming. Within those sections, you will learn cutting-edge techniques on essential subjects such as COLLADA rendering, exporting and workflow; asset management and compiler architecture; and moving tools to the cloud. If youre a game developer, you needGame Development Tool Essentials. Covers readily available tools and tools developers can build themselves. Presents 96 code samples, 81 illustrations, and end-of-chapter references. Special chapter on moving tools to the cloud. What youll learn Set up and code a plug-in-based asset compiler that can help convert a variety of asset types. Create a complex polygon pattern (Voronoi diagram) using MAXScript. Learn how to use the Khronos COLLADA CTS to build a rock solid 3D content pipeline. Discover powerful tricks for using OS X Scene Kit to render COLLADA assets. Build full-featured online game development tools easily with Django. Move companion tools out of the game engine and into Web applications.Who this book is for Game Development Tool Essentialsis for working and prospective game developers. It will help software engineers, systems programmers, graphics architects, technical artists, 3D artists, software architects, and 3D modelers involved with the game development pipeline.

Programming: Decoupling Game Tool GUIs from Core Editing Operations

Since the early days of video game development when the programmer had to write the code plus design and create the levels without the aid of a game editor, the tools to create games have evolved into the must-have game development software we use today. Now the level editors are built into the development kits, and the developer’s job is much easier—but still filled with potential pitfalls. In the past few years, it has become common to decouple game level editor operations and functionality from game-specific features, so that the editor can be reused for more games and game types. The same thing has happened on the game engine side: engines have become more and more flexible and reusable. But problems remain. One big issue with game level editors is complexity and manageability. Once you have added many features to the editor, it will grow in source code size and complexity, and will become harder and harder to maintain and extend. Another problem is that you have to choose a GUI toolkit to create your interface. That can become a headache if you ever decide to switch to another GUI toolkit, since many editing operations are tied in with the UI code itself. To address the issue of changing GUI toolkits in these fast and ever-shifting times, we present a method of decoupling the visual user interface code from the non-GUI editing operations code in the game level editor or other tools. By separating the UI from core editing functions, you can change to another GUI toolkit in no time, leaving the editing operations code almost untouched. The decoupling operation can be accomplished via C++ editor core functionality code and various editor user interfaces using GUI toolkits like Qt, MS WinForms, WPF, MFC, HTML5/JavaScript, or even a command-line editor UI, all using the same editor functionality code as a common hub. Communication between the editor functions and the visual interface is achieved through a command system (basically the Command Pattern). We will also explore the architecture of a plug-in system using this command communication approach.

Rendering COLLADA Assets on Mac OS X with Scene Kit

Since Snow Leopard (10.6) was released in 2009, OS X has provided built-in support for COLLADA assets. So far, this support has enabled visualization of COLLADA assets in Preview and Quick Look. Developers using Quartz Composer have also been able to render COLLADA assets in their compositions, but until now, an API was still to be exposed. Now, with Mountain Lion (10.8), OS X has introduced a new 3D framework called Scene Kit that adds significant COLLADA functionality. This chapter explains how to use Scene Kit to render COLLADA assets. Incorporating a worked example, it offers an overview of Scene Kit and its relationship to COLLADA; shows how to integrate Scene Kit with Xcode; presents key aspects of the Scene Kit API like COLLADA scene import and scene graph manipulations, animations, and rendering; and touches on more advanced topics such as custom rendering. To get the most out of this chapter, it is recommended but not required that you have a basic knowledge of COLLADA and a working knowledge of Objective-C.

Building a Rock-Solid Content Pipeline with the COLLADA Conformance Test Suite

If there’s one message emanating from the 3D content creation community these days, it’s “Ouch!” We all know why. There’s too much pain in the 3D content creation pipeline: incompatible formats, obsolescence of older material, platform limitations, and so on. Fortunately, there’s something we can do to ease the pain: create tools that adhere to open standards, such as COLLADA, a royalty-free, open standard schema for exchanging 3D assets.