

Sony Open-Sources Authoring Tools Framework (ATF) - fekberg
https://github.com/SonyWWS/ATF

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616c
I am intrigued because the readme at Github mentions Naughty Dog using it for
level shading and such, and I was recently impressed to hear anecdotal
evidence of them, for the longest time, using Lisp and now MzScheme/Racket
(they are really using the former because they have not been able to update
their codebase substantially) to stitch everything together for building all
the media into a test environment for games, going back to Jax. And they have
been doing so as late as 2013, if you believe the ND employee who talked at
RacketCon.

[http://con.racket-lang.org/2013/danl-slides.pdf](http://con.racket-
lang.org/2013/danl-slides.pdf)

It sounds like they have quite a ... heterogeneous environment.

~~~
Narishma
This framework is used for making tools, Lisp, or rather their own variant of
it, is used in-game as a scripting language and goes all the way back to their
Crash Bandicoot games on the PS1.

I believe I read somewhere that since coming to the PS3 generation they
started moving more of their systems to C# and C++ in order to be able to
share more code with the other Sony WWS.

~~~
616c
Ironically, my impression, and with the caveat I have not had enough time to
complete watching the Naughty Dog talk from RacketCon, is the opposite.

Rather, the guy who moved it from Common Lisp to Racket informed the audience
it is actually used like an advanced templating system to allow the
system/core devs to interface with sound engineers and programmer-designers
(not artists, but the guys coding the art into Maya3D templates and what not)
to generate proper header and class structure for their C++ engine. These guys
are not the core C++ devs, so they needed something to streamline their work
for many test builds and that could be used to assist programmers that were
not trained or designated for core systems programming (with C++ and all that
entails). This actually irritated one guy in the audience, and made me laugh
because CL variants have many more native code compilers, and the native C
transpiler in Racket (although useful) is touted as something you would use
(it is for systems porting), because their JIT and native code compilation
receives a lot more work.

Anyway, this is all here-say. I would say watch the video and read the slides.
Although Racketeers will be disappointed that this dev from ND, sometimes
apologetically, admits they used MzScheme and had not really moving ahead with
updating to later Racket versions (hence the name change) or many other
features.

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pjmlp
Nice to see memory safe languages gaining a stronghold on big game development
studios, even if mostly tooling related.

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flohofwoe
This is impressive, comes with a lot of samples, and has the UI components
every game studio needs for their tools (timeline editor, state machine
editor, proper tree view, etc). Samples compile and run out-of-the box in
VStudio2010. Also comes with a PDF detailing why .NET is a better choice then
Qt, but I don't quite buy that ;)

~~~
boost_
its not even a fair comparison, because it's not comparing .NET with Qt, it's
comparing ATF (the name of this toolset) with Qt.

so it's like saying "using our 3d game engine is easier to build games than
pure opengl", which makes sense because it was made for it. now when they
compare ATF with another toolset like it build in Qt then it will be a fair
comparison.

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zurn
The description says it's for Windows. Anyone know what's blocking it on Mono?
Or possibly they've just had a Windows-only target for management reasons and
didn't investigate Mono yet?

~~~
ygra
Since this is related to tools surrounding games there probably isn't much
point to make it really cross-platform. If your designers and developers are
using Windows anyway investing resources in a Linux version doesn't help
anyone. The games themselves run on other platforms anyway and don't care
where the levels were designed.

A few things that won't run on Mono are pointed out in the readme as well:
»You must have Windows 7 or later to run the circuit, FSM, statechart, and
timeline editors, due to their use of Direct2D.«

~~~
zurn
Thanks for pointing out the Windows dependencies from the page!

Lots of people are doing game dev on Mac and Linux, though not so much on the
big game studio dept. For example you can do Unity dev (& target all
platforms) + iOS dev + Android dev on a Mac pretty well.

~~~
ygra
Well, this is Sony open-sourcing an until-now internal tool. Which means that
up until now their only interest was to satisfy their own developers. Who are
most likely on Windows.

