Project Skyline – Autodesk at GDC
March 2, 2011, Game Developers’ Conference, San Francisco–one session here at GDC looked at “data management for modern game pipelines” as a way to improve game development time. Mathieu Mazzerolle and Alexandre Jean Claud from Autodesk looked at existing workflows and helped to create new flows and tools for game development.
Many development systems are configured as follows: art tool feeding a level editor, followed by a game run-time engine. This linear flow requires developers to validate their efforts at the end of the pipeline, where debug is slow and hard. The time for a single iteration is very long, compared to the time for any individual step, and there is no feedback across the silos.
Instead, they are advocating changing from this linear file-based flow to a non-linear, database flow or data pipeline. Live links across the editing tools, runtime engines, and the database enable querying, interaction, and collaboration. In this flow, an edit can be quickly viewed, so there is a direct connection between the artwork or game structure changes and their results in the game. The addition of the database into the flow improves response time and feedback to the editor so there is less guessing about the size and nature of any changes. The asset database enables a collaborative workflow compared to the discrete nature of file-based silo workflows.
New game workflow
In addition to the developer interaction and response time improvements, the database also can perform other essential functions. Among these functions are content management, versioning, check-in and -out, transactions, and many other data management functions. By developing a good data management architecture, the user can control classes, tags, strong-weak references, and attach important and relevant metadata.
The database can perform many types of checks for relationships and dependencies that can ease the work. Versioning can be referenced to values and not to versions, content can be identified as assets and as metadata to allow for more types of search, schema can be created to address sets of types.
The downside of the middleware is that it is very expensive to develop this infrastructure. In addition, the art tools are a different branch of the database, so they are still isolated. If there is no commercial database that performs all of the functions, each tool will need to be integrated into the database structure and checked to ensure that it works as intended.
Autodesk’s vision is to improve game development by adding live content authoring to today’s workflows. This will reduce iteration time by allowing artists to see and interact with content immediately within the game engine. It will enable artists to identify, diagnose and fix problems without programmer intervention and simultaneously allow programmers to focus on building features rather than debugging code and fixing problems. By adding a modular run-time engine to the other tools and a comprehensive database, they hope to minimize the creation of low-level animation code. All of these features are in a future technology called Project Skyline, that is coming out some time next year.
