GDC 2009 - Technical Issues In Tools Development Notes - Friday

Internal Version Control /Distribution

Pushing Discreet Versions of Continuous Content Drops?
Best Practices
- Insomniac:
  - Uses internal versions compiled into all tools
  - the tools installs are linkd to that version
- Bunge
  - Discreet versions, but any developer can grab from “Unsafe”
  - Unsafe versions are always synced back to safe
Deploying tools?
- anything to force tools updates?
- One studio has a standalone tools updater that checks versions of tools and updates.
Big changes?
- Force updates in that case (send out an email blast)
- Don’t allow updates to content until you get new tools (the tools check the versions.)

Migrating from an old tool to new tools?
- especially with things like gcc / external tools
- consensus was: don’t do this mid-project
- What about migration of file formats / auto migration?
  - usually this is done with an email blast “Hey we’re breaking your stuff!”

Some automated bug reporting on all crashes
Thank uses for suggestions, creates a positive feedback loop for new suggestions
tools have embedded bug reporting methods
Insomniac has crash report generator w/ MySQL functionality that aggregates issues
- This will be open sourced as part of Nocturnal

Survey:
- Dedicated Tools QA: Lots!
- Stealing QA from other departments: Some
- Customers are QA: More then you’d expect
Tools playback? (logging everything to play back issues later)
- one person
- Worth it? Sure
- Command history for undo/redo, can dump that on crash

Survey Who’s using:
- Scrum: Lots – well suited to tools development
  - games are harder obviously
- XP (Extreme Programming): None
- Waterfall: none
- Cowboy / Ad-hoc (probably the two / three people who suggested it)
How do you figure out what features to implement
- Allow all users to add features requests, then have a director decide
- Listen to people bitch (be proactive… have lunch with tools users as much as possible.)
- Scrum: try to be together with the person using that tool. Not too many people do that (surprisingly)
Ed Note: Put together teams that are cross disciplinary to discuss the tools!
Insomniac does weekly tools show and tell, which is a good feedback loop.

Depends on how people commit assets:
- “How you give out the keys to the Kingdom?”
- VPN users: need lots of access
- Contractors: some, don’t want to give them everything.
  - Do a tech branch?
Two things that help
- Walkthroughs
- Better error messages
- Walkthrough video s are better and they also help expose problems to the tool set to the programmer himself (as he records the walkthrough)

Some had full time documentation people
some have, but it depends on when people read the documentation
To help people read it, provide good search features.
Also have a “help” button which is context sensitive.
Survey: Who’s using context sensitive?
- Very few people.
- Most people just say “here’s the wiki”

GDC Tools Roundtables Notes:

GDC 2009:

GDC 2008:

GDC 2007: