The Content Pipeline

There's the saying all roads lead to Rome. Well for the Hulkengine all roads lead to 3dsMax. Now I can already hear people grumbling. Believe me when I say I understand your concerns and worries but let me see if I can convince you I have valid reasons.

1. My artist works in Max

OK so I only have one reason. It's a powerful reason none the less. Anyway I haven't explained what I mean yet.

Max is where all my game content gets linked into the game. Max is my game editor. Now I'm not the first person or even game studio to try this. There are several drawbacks but the biggest being cost doesn't really apply to me. Basically because I'm planning on making small games even if I had a small team that would only be a few Max licenses. For big studios it's probably cheaper to create a game editor then have everyone use Max.

There are other problems beyond cost for using Max. The api is clunky and it's hard to create gui's for. You can use Maxscript for lots of things and I do but I'm not Maxscript guru and that means another language to support. I like the idea of using the right language for the problem but only when that language interests me and Maxscript definitely does not.

So how will this all work? What will I use max for exactly? Well obviously art assets. Artist will be able to create models/animations in Max click export and then run the game and view their newly created content. More interesting is the ability to attach game content in max. So once an artist has laid out the art for a level a designer will load that level up and begin to attach game content.

Game content will be attached using Maxscript widgets. Basically the designer will run the Hulkengine Maxscript and see a list of game specific components that he can attach to a Max Node. Then the designer can click export and all the art with game components will export and then he can see/play the game with his content.

The same is true for programmer or sound designer content. All content will go through Max and then into the game.

Here's hoping this works well. Note I had a terrible time placing these images so that's my first blogger negative.