Albion Knight
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Tools at Lionhead
SourceSam Swain said:Hi folks, another CTG member here. I’m Sam (yes, another one) and I'm a senior coder on the central tools team. I've been working on the tools side of the 'Concrete' system since I started at Lionhead over two years ago now. Concrete hasn't been talked about in the press much at all, so hopefully we can remedy this a little via these 'blogs revealing a little more about it and what it means to Fable 2.
Concrete is a philosophy, intended to encourage re-use of code and assets. This takes the form of both game-side and tools-side frameworks on top of which are built many modular plug-in pieces of functionality. I've been tasked with developing the tools side of things to support the tools needed by Fable 2, a lot of these which will ultimately help increase the productivity of the content creation teams. Fable 2 has it's own tools team as well which deals with the specific requirements generated by the game in terms of custom tools and utilities. This includes the teams own customised editor with all the things Fable needs such as height-field editing and entity placement. CTG (normally) just deal with the underlying functionality common to all tools based on the framework.
The Fable 2 level editor ('FablEd') is really an edit 'suite' formed from a large collection of tool plug-ins that provide all the editing facilities needed by the various disciplines (including the likes of level designers, artists, scripters, game-play coders, sound engineers, and animators). The editor maintains a large database of all the game content and provides many ways to edit it. This can be from standard file management and property editing functionality to far more advanced data manipulation such as height-field sculpting and animation time-line tagging. To give you a taster and add more of a talking point, here's a picture of FablEd in action:
I'd also like to use this 'blog to talk (and discuss) a bit about tools technology and philosophy in general from time to time. If there's any specific topics or areas of interest, let me know and I will try to include them in future posts.
Thanks for your time.
Sam
Mwarharhar. Great toddy. rep+
