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http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20040910/tavares_01.shtml
Excellent article, spot on!
Programmers – read and learn :)
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AMEN brother!
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I totally agree… I’ve worked as both technical artist, and games programmer so I am very aware of the language barrier between the two disciplines.
When working at Shiny, I upgraded the previous artists work flow by implementing a single-button click exporter and a single-click build-and-run icon to play the game ( previously, the artists had to use quite a complicated exporter, as well as run some PROGRAMMER: “quite simple” NON-TECHIE/ARTIST: “WTF do these all mean” command-line tools. The exporter did detect and display as many errors as possible at the 3DS Max stage, so the artists could fix them ASAP, rather than finding out about them at a later stage ( ie when the game was loading up ).
For 99% of the time, artists just want to view their new / modified content in the game as soon as possible. For the other 1%, the programmer can set up custom command-line driven Klingon-error messaged tools behind a badly drawn icon they created ( which the artist can then change to a more suitable, asthetically pleasing one ), or just handle special cases themselves ( it’s good to get a bit of dialog between coders and artists at least one a week :) ).
With our current toolkit for teaching 3D modelling, the export process is basically one-step ( there couldn’t actually be any less steps, unless we integrated the game into the 3D modelling package ). Also very important is that our toolchain ALWAYS works every single time ( a lot of game export chains break with bad data: we handle this using techniques mentioned in the docs ).
This is especially important as the toolkit is aimed at students, who don’t have time to learn a complicated package like 3DS Max / Maya / Lightwave, as well as learning a complex export toolchain.
Cleaning up artist tools for some programmers is a bit of a task, and does take a bit of time, but in most teams the number of artists out-numbers the number of coders. Also, each of these artists will be using that tool quite a number of times a day. For each hour that the programmer spends making the tools more accessible, there is an exponential saving in the number of hours the artists don’t have to spend scratching their creative heads looking up the Klingon dictionary ( http://klingonska.org/dict/ ) for a solution.
Yikes, that was a bit of a rant. What’s the Klingon for later dudes?
Mal -
QaQ jaj
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Today is a good day to kill artists?
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AMEN brother![/quote:7a6c268576]
Ahh woops, now i get it.
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