Game Development Tool Essentials

✍ Scribed by Alessandro Ardolino, Remi Arnaud, Paula Berinstein, Simon Franco, Adrien Herubel, John McCutchan, Nicusor Nedelcu, Benjamin Nitschke, Fabrice Robinet, Christian Ronchi, Gustavo Samour, Rita Turkowski, Robert Walter (auth.)

• Publisher: Apress
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 201
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Game Development Tool Essentials provides 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 Essentials pools 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 you’re a game developer, you need Game 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.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xxxiv
Front Matter....Pages 1-1
Plug-in–based Asset Compiler Architecture....Pages 3-6
GFX Asset Data Management....Pages 7-15
Front Matter....Pages 17-17
Geometry and Models: 3D Format Conversion (FBX, COLLADA)....Pages 19-37
Building Procedural Geometry Using MAXScript (Voronoi Polygons)....Pages 39-53
A Uniform Geometry Workflow for Cutscenes and Animated Feature Films....Pages 55-65
Building a Rock-Solid Content Pipeline with the COLLADA Conformance Test Suite....Pages 67-86
Rendering COLLADA Assets on Mac OS X with Scene Kit....Pages 87-94
COLLADA Exporter for Unity Developers in the Unity Asset Store....Pages 95-102
Front Matter....Pages 103-103
Introduction to Utilizing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to Create Rich Debugging Information....Pages 105-115
Moving Tools to the Cloud: Control, Configure, Monitor, and View Your Game with WebSocket....Pages 117-127
Front Matter....Pages 129-129
Programming: Decoupling Game Tool GUIs from Core Editing Operations....Pages 131-147
Building A Game Prototyping Tool for Android Mobile Devices....Pages 149-171
Engineering Domain-Specific Languages for Games....Pages 173-188
Back Matter....Pages 189-192

✦ Subjects

Computer Science, general; Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems