Don Moar
Lead Programmer
Joined: 17 Oct 2001
From: BioWare
|
 Posted: Thursday, 24 June 2004 06:50AM
Hey,
Tools monkeys, Georg? :)
Just to set the record straight: When I started at BioWare, in February of '99, the tools team consisted of just two programmers, myself and one other. It now has 22 programmers and is still growing. When I started, we supported only one project, we now support five (currently they are JE / DA / Live Team / Localization / Unannounced).
The typical project requires anywhere from 20 to 50 individual pieces of tools software ranging in size from a few dozen lines of code to several hundred thousand and with purposes as diverse as content creation to bug tracking to asset management. Some tools depend upon game and graphics systems and require constant maintenance, others are built once and then used for months or years almost without modification. Some tools we know about at the beginning of the project or can anticipate and so design and construction starts as early as possible, but there are others that appear unexpectedly and can only be built later, as the need arises.
The advantage of having a dedicated team of tools programmers like we do at BioWare is that we can more easily apply the lessons learned on previous projects (What tools were required? How long did they take to design and build? When did we realize that they were necessary? etc.) to the current ones. The implication of this is that it should mean better (in at least one respect or another) tools for the community on those projects where they are included.
I'll let Tim & Co. go into the particular details for DA later. :)
Don M
|
