All modern games are reliant upon a sturdy set of tools for development. For MMOG titles this is even more important as producing the initially released boxed game is only part of the service. Live operations and ongoing content creation are just as important if not more so. The Monumental Technology Suite engine includes a comprehensive suite of tools. Everything from the art pipeline through to in-game content creation is catered for. Freedom is the key, with many tools being independent of the game being produced. Artists and Designers are able to use the tools without programmer intervention to implement both the visuals and gameplay necessary to produce a cutting-edge prod¬uct. Many tools are network-aware thereby ensuring that assets are not lost or overwritten.
Features
- Skin snatching
- Asset resource control
- String application
- Shaders & Materials
- Model/Entity generator
- World editor
- Player character creation
- Artefact editor
- Script editor
- Sound catalogue editor
- Special effects editor
- Operation tools
Development Tools
Skin Snatching Tool
An artist tool that dramatically reduces the time it takes to skin a model. By exploiting symmetry in most models this can as much as halve the time it takes to skin a model. Furthermore, models can be skinned, modified and then re-skinned from the original data all quickly and easily therefore saving valuable art time.
Asset Resource Control
The Asset Resource Control tool allows all assets used within development of the game to be well organised and safely managed. Using proprietary tools, the Asset Resource Control is fully integrated with development applications such as Photoshop and 3D Studio Max. It also forms the pivotal base for game builds ensuring that source assets are isolated from in-game assets.
String Application
The String Application is a network aware string table editor that facilitates easy entry and management of string tables. This tool is fundamental to localisation. From day one, a project works with the table editor assets thereby ensuring that localisation does not become an issue late in the development cycle.
Shaders & Materials
Shaders & Materials is an artist tool that allows en-masse changes or small changes to any shaders or materials that are used in the game. Using a dynamic preview facility with the in-game rendering engine, an artist is able to create and maintain shaders and materials with complete confidence in how it will finally appear. Shaders & Materials is network aware and integrated with all of the source model exporters.
Sophisticated Model/Entity Generator
This tool handles the construction of in-game entities. By providing a fully interactive model viewing and animation system, entities can be constructed from base level models and animated. Special effects such as particle systems, texture transforms and the like are also defined in this manner making the system completely content-driven.
World Editor
This is an immensely powerful tool that allows for the creation and manipula¬tion of game content. The World Editor allows designers to place terrain into the world map and sculpt it as required. By placing procedural modifiers (functions) that not only shape the terrain but also dictate how it is to be textured a world can be designed and built in a very short period of time. Support for pathways, rivers and other complicated elements is provided thereby saving even more time and effort. The World Editor allows the placing of artefacts within that terrain and the creating and editing of scripts to define the rules governing those artefacts. The World Editor is fully integrated with a back-end server allowing multiple, concurrent user access. Using proprietary plugin technology, the World Editor is extensible on a per-project basis to facilitate the production of game-specific content. With this approach, the World Editor is suited to the creation of content for many different types of game.
Artefact Editor
With this tool designers can construct large artefacts from a tile set. The prime example of this is buildings. The editor provides a comprehensive suite of tools that allow the designer to create the perfect dwelling using tiles as building blocks. The tools allow tile manipulation, animation and lighting to be performed with ease. A cut out tool prepares the artefact for placement in the World Editor, ensuring the seamless integration of artefacts and terrain within the game world environment. A whole city of individual looking buildings can be constructed in a small amount of time from a set of pre-generated tiles. Using this technique, data storage requirements are minimized without compromising quality or variation. But why stop at a city? With the Artefact Editor and the right tile set a designer can create artefacts such as cellars, dungeons, caves and much, much more.
Player Character Creation Viewer
The Viewer is the character equivalent of the Artefact Editor. Unique looking characters can be quickly and easily assembled from a selection of stock body parts. In this way, hundreds if not thousands of unique looking characters can be produced in a fraction of the time required by traditional techniques.
Script Editor
Many of the in-game features are designer controlled using a high-level scripting engine. The script editor is a fully featured scripting development environment enabling designers to quickly check their script syntax and perform rudimentary execution checks before exposing their scripts to the game. This dramatically reduces the development cycle and increases productivity.
Sound Catalogue Editor
Sound is often an area that is overlooked or given low priority. With Monumental Technology Suiteâ„¢, sounds are defined logically so that they can be used within animations without actually knowing what the sound samples are. Scat associates these logical sounds with physical sound files allowing features like random selection, sequencing and parameter control of volume, pan, minimum and maximum distances, range and priority. What this means is that the implementation of sound within the game is totally decoupled from programmers and artists and left firmly in the hands of an audio engineer. They are then free to configure and tweak the audio using a collection of tools to improve the in-game experience.
Special Effects Editor
The special effects editor is a robust, efficient and versatile special effects system that allows artists to add scripted behaviour to graphics assets. The scripts can be expressed in a number of ways (e.g. via a text-based programming language (Fritz) or via a point and click “wiring diagram” graphical interface). The special effects editor is demand-based and integrates fully with the Monumental Technology Suite graphics engine, taking advantage of engine features in order to significantly reduce the amount of work it does each frame (e.g. via frustum and/or occlusion culling). It also integrates with the Monumental Technology Suite art pipeline, so that most graphics assets can be given special effects behaviours to control material properties, lights and particle systems. Fritz also integrates with Monumental Technology Suite at the D3DXEffect level, so artists can create new shaders and effects for their assets, thus controlling them from within the special effects editor, without changing or recompiling any program code!
