Real-time collaberation on same projects/scenes
polycounter lvl 7
Hello all,
I was going over how the many types of current games today seam to be moving away from the linear-level approach and more towards an open-world/seamless level system, and was wondering if anyone could share some insights into how their teams typically work on such large projects.
I usually thought of the process traditionally as one where the levels are divided up into segments, placeholder assets are placed and used by level designers and reimported as individual artists work on the ones assigned to them, and once the level design is done it gets passed off to the lighters while everyone moves on to their next section.
Unfortunately while this process seams logical for a game with traditional linear levels, it starts to seem (at least to me) that this process might not make as much sense for the larger and more open games.
Basically I'm wondering if people have looked into solutions to having multiple artists working on the same "world" at once in real/semi-real time without having to keep transferring each other files or writing up the changes/maintain version control.
I do remember seeing at a conference a piece of software called Lagoa used by multiple people in the same scene at the same time, which I thought was pretty damned sweet. http://home.lagoa.com/collaboration/
Does anyone actually use something similar in game production like Ubisoft, Rockstar, Besthesda titles, etc. or is it still just basically version control. (I know TESCS for Bethesda uses cell-based areas, so I figured they probably just transfer over the cell data to one master project)
I feel like having multiple people working on a scene in real-time could have some pretty noticeable benefits, it gets especially interesting for me in regards to cross-collaboration in actual modeling and animation packages as well as world-building.
Feel free to discuss
I was going over how the many types of current games today seam to be moving away from the linear-level approach and more towards an open-world/seamless level system, and was wondering if anyone could share some insights into how their teams typically work on such large projects.
I usually thought of the process traditionally as one where the levels are divided up into segments, placeholder assets are placed and used by level designers and reimported as individual artists work on the ones assigned to them, and once the level design is done it gets passed off to the lighters while everyone moves on to their next section.
Unfortunately while this process seams logical for a game with traditional linear levels, it starts to seem (at least to me) that this process might not make as much sense for the larger and more open games.
Basically I'm wondering if people have looked into solutions to having multiple artists working on the same "world" at once in real/semi-real time without having to keep transferring each other files or writing up the changes/maintain version control.
I do remember seeing at a conference a piece of software called Lagoa used by multiple people in the same scene at the same time, which I thought was pretty damned sweet. http://home.lagoa.com/collaboration/
Does anyone actually use something similar in game production like Ubisoft, Rockstar, Besthesda titles, etc. or is it still just basically version control. (I know TESCS for Bethesda uses cell-based areas, so I figured they probably just transfer over the cell data to one master project)
I feel like having multiple people working on a scene in real-time could have some pretty noticeable benefits, it gets especially interesting for me in regards to cross-collaboration in actual modeling and animation packages as well as world-building.
Feel free to discuss
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