Best engine and tools for a TA and GAMDEVs

Hi guys!

I would like to put here another open question…

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

SCULPTING PACKAGES
Zbrush
Mudbox

TERRAIN TOOLS
Worldmachine
Grome

SHADER TOOLS
Rendermonkey
PVR shader editor
PVR shaman

CODE TOOLS
Notepad++
Sublime text
Atom
Visual studio
PyCharm
Wing
PyDev

TEXTURE + BAKING TOOLS
Photoshop
Gimp
3d coat
Substance designer
Xnormal
Quixel suite
(DDo, NDo… )
Flowmap painter ( http://teckartist.com/?p=96 )

SOURCE CONTROL
[B]Perforce
Git
Mercurial
SVN
CVS
Snoop /B for the WPF people

TRACKING + PLANNING
Excel
Project
Jira
Shotgun
Trello
Google docs
Pencil
( http://pencil.evolus.vn )
[B]yED /B
MS Visio
Astah
StarUML
GanttProject
Evernote

DATABASE CLIENTS
HeidiSQL (MySQL / MariaDB)
MongoChef (MongoDB)
SqliteBrowser (SQLite)
NoSQL Manager

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 ( https://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/ )
    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 :stuck_out_tongue: (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 :wink:

cheers!

I would love to add your suggestions here :smiley:

You left out source control.
Perforce, Git, Mercurial, SVN, CVS, some other unholy thing that Microsoft likes to torture people with.

Also a lot of studio’s don’t use off the shelf engines, so you’ve got a non-trivial amount of proprietary internal tooling in a situation like that.

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.

@btribble & R.White

Wow, you’re totally right guys!
I’m adding them right now :slight_smile:

thnx!

#EDIT: Done! I added some others I used there too

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=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) :slight_smile:

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.

Houdini
FlowMap by painter by the wonderful Teck ( http://teckartist.com/?p=96 )
Everything ( https://www.voidtools.com/ )
Snoop ( https://snoopwpf.codeplex.com/ ) for the WPF people
Greenshot for easy screengrabbing
Entrian ( if you are using Visual studio, its awesome) : http://entrian.com/
Resharper ( if you are doing C# and using VS ) : https://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

xnView get my vote too! xnViewMP for Mac

Database clients (all free):

  • HeidiSQL (MySQL / MariaDB)
    alternative is MySQL Workbench, but I find it very cumbersome
  • MongoChef (MongoDB)
    NoSQL Manager for MongoDB would be a paid alternative. There’s also a version for Cassandra though
  • SqliteBrowser (SQLite) https://github.com/sqlitebrowser/sqlitebrowser/releases

Other dev & planning tools (free):

  • Pencil for UI mockups, including mobile: http://pencil.evolus.vn
    AxureRP is a paid alternative; or use Qt Designer
  • yED for all sorts of diagrams, flowcharts, ERDs, anything: https://www.yworks.com/products/yed
    paid alternatives would be MS Visio
  • XVI32 because everyone should have a hex editor installed: http://www.chmaas.handshake.de/delphi/freeware/xvi32/xvi32.htm
  • Winmerge
  • Astah for documenting those complex tools using UML: http://astah.net/editions/community
    StarUML is an alternative
  • GanttProject for making simple GANTT charts of project stages, or anything remotely waterfall: https://sourceforge.net/projects/ganttproject/
    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:

3D:

  • Marmoset Toolbag for quick presentations
  • Modo

woa!
lots of suggestions there!

thnx guys!

I would need a couple of minutes in order to sort them and add them to the list :slight_smile:

#EDIT: list udpated! thnx again guys :smiley:

Leaving Visual Studio out of the Code Tools seems like quite an oversight.

Ha! Yeah I can’t believe I missed that.

ops, my bad!

in fact is there but I messed the lines and it was merged with the “atom” :stuck_out_tongue:

#EDIT: fixed! (thnx guys)

Self-promotion but what the heck…

EDIT: The youtube -tag is broken!

//youtu.be/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDOP6d-Fkdw

(also tried it with the embed-address)

Wow!
Impressive UV tool :smiley:

#EDIT: I’ve just added it to the tool list :wink: