Lately I was wondering wich are the best tools and engines you can use for gamedevelopment.
I have the impression that a lot of us we use more or less the same “standard” tools but I’m sure too that we use some “out of the box” tools for certain tasks:
For instance, these are some of the tools that I’ve been using:
ENGINES 3D Cryengine
UDK
Unity
Crystal space
ENGINES 2D Gamemaker
Cocos 2D
3D PACKAGES 3dsmax
Maya
Blender
Houdini Marmoset Toolbag Modo
MISC TOOLS Xnview - image browser Topogun- for 3d retopology UV layout- unwraps an uv mapping Unwrella- unwraps an uv mapping Flatiron- unwraps an uv mapping
for texture painting mainly Everything- file explorer ( https://www.voidtools.com/ ) Entrian- for visual studio ( http://entrian.com/ ) Resharper- if you are doing C# and using VS ( The Visual Studio Extension for .NET Developers ) Green shot- for easy screengrabbing GifCam- record desktop interactions as animated gif VMWare Workstation- to virtualize machines Icofx- for creating icons XVI32- hex editor
[B]Nightshade UV editor /B- Awesome and super usefull UV editor created by Nightshade Bulk Rename Utility- to rename files massively
And more or less this is my complete toolkit (and for sure I’m missing some others…)
Anyway, I’m sure you have some other tricks on the sleeve we all would like to hear
[QUOTE=R.White;29860]a lot of studio’s don’t use off the shelf engines[/QUOTE]
This is very true. Teams/companies often start out with an off the shelf engine and then migrate to an internal engine as their needs outgrow the capabilities of the tools. Sometimes you need features that aren’t available, or can’t be optimized easily in an off the shelf engine, or perhaps integrating developer changes to engine code have become too cumbersome because of the number of changes you’ve made.
The only real takeaway here is that all of these technologies should be looked at as being starting points, and not necessarily the end-all be-all.
Also, our TA folks spend a portion of their time supporting planning/tasking/tracking tools and related automation, so there are additional potential categories for you:
Tracking / Planning:
Excel
Project
Jira
Shotgun
…
Obviously, this is not as fun as the stuff listed above, but it is a reality for many shops.
BTW, wich ones would be your “start players” (the one you would recommend over the rest for any reason…) and why?
From all the utilities we listed there, mine would be: “Bulk Rename Utility”
It’s a tiny and free tool and it’s soooooooo usefull. It saved me A LOT of time renaming hundreds of assets at once.
[QUOTE=Marc;29874]BTW, wich ones would be your “start players” (the one you would recommend over the rest for any reason…) and why?
From all the utilities we listed there, mine would be: “Bulk Rename Utility”
It’s a tiny and free tool and it’s soooooooo usefull. It saved me A LOT of time renaming hundreds of assets at once.
cheers![/QUOTE]
Notepad++
It has good syntax highlighting. It loads relatively large files. It deals with different line endings, etc. We install it on all production machines because we got tired of trying to debug stuff in Wordpad.
[QUOTE=btribble;29884]Notepad++
It has good syntax highlighting. It loads relatively large files. It deals with different line endings, etc. We install it on all production machines because we got tired of trying to debug stuff in Wordpad.[/QUOTE]
yeah! it’s another one incredibly usefull.
I’m adding XNVIEW too. It’s the spiritual predecessor of acdsee (a lot lighter and more powerfull than the old pal)
For code tools you’ll probably want to add PyCharm, Wing, and PyDev (Eclipse) for python development.
You’ve also got sublime text, atom, and Visual Studio Code as text editors similar to notepad++.
All of these are I believe cross platform, whereas notepad++ does suffer a bit for being windows only. Though still an excellent tool.
GanttProject for making simple GANTT charts of project stages, or anything remotely waterfall: GanttProject download | SourceForge.net
I usually use this for experimental planning before I put it into a big project management software, like Hansoft
GifCam: record desktop interactions as animated gif. Great for tutorials and embedding in Wikis or emails: http://blog.bahraniapps.com/gifcam/
IcoFX (v 1.6.4 is free) for creating icons for your stand-alone applications and shortucts
Evernote: I collect tutorials, todo lists, tips and tricks, account settings, etc. in it so I always have them where I need them
VMWare Workstation: best VM software to virtualize machines that can run 3D software like Maya or Max at acceptable performance
IT Tools:
NTFS Junction: adds a context menu to the explorer to make junctions. Great when your SSD runs out of space. Should be installed on every PC: Link Shell Extension
(and for sure I’m missing some others…)
