Re: [GD-General] asset & document management

[Kent Q. <ken...@co...>]

At 01:54 PM 5/15/2003 +0200, you wrote:
>What kind of tools do other game developers use?
>
>I've been a die-hard CVS fan for many, many years now, and two years ago, 
>added bugzilla to the list of tools I wouldn't want to work without. But I 
>realize that there are still things I lack.

A good bug tracker is indispensable. Has bugzilla gotten any easier to 
install since last year? I looked at it and ran away in horror.

>One thing is document management. A game can create lots and lots of 
>documents, and just putting them into revision control isn't enough - I 
>need a way to search for them, I want fulltext search through all of them, 
>keywords, categories, compare revisions, and more - or at least a 
>significant subset of those features. I worked on a project that used MS 
>Sharepoint for this, and while that was okay, it had its own set of 
>problems (It still became messy after a while, and it didn't work in 
>non-IE browsers, plus it's not good at storing html documents). Has anyone 
>had good experience with other such software?

Annoyingly, by far the best product of this type I've ever used is Lotus 
Notes. I say "annoyingly" because it's got a strange design dating back to 
1993. But it has the best metaphor for managing sets of related documents 
I've ever seen, and in modern versions you can use it pretty effectively 
without having to install the Notes client on everyone's desktop. We have 
used it for everything from bug tracking to design databases to actual code 
repositories and code generators for components that had to fit within a 
special template.

But with all that said, we're now moving to custom XML designs for all our 
document types. We've built the beginnings of a general-purpose XML forms 
editor tool (there are such things available from people like Altova as 
well). Having the data in an XML format means that it's pretty easy to 
build/find tools to transform, catalog, index, and search in the files. But 
you also want a decent editor to use while working with them.


>The other thing I miss is asset management for large binaries - stuff that 
>we can't or shouldn't put into CVS. I know there's alienbrain, but for 
>some reason the evaluation didn't leave our artists very happy. It's also 
>not exactly cheap, IIRC. Do you know anything else, are you using 
>something that makes you say "wouldn't know how I could live without it"?

We did large assets ourselves through a custom system that stored them on a 
server and kept a database catalog of them. Alienbrain initially looked 
more like a tool kit than an actual application, but I've heard lately that 
it's gotten better.

I'd also say that artist's opinions on data organization are highly 
suspect. It's been my experience (and yes, I'm generalizing) that artists 
have to be dragged kicking and screaming into any kind of structured data 
organization. They're visual people and tend not to care that much about 
silly things like textual names. The key is to find a system that lets you 
find the assets you need with minimal impact on artist productivity.

Seems like a lot of people build their own, here.

         Kent


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Kent Quirk, CTO, CogniToy
ken...@co...
http://www.cognitoy.com