Comments on: Ten Ways to Improve Developer Efficiency

By: Richard Slater

Richard Slater — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 09:20:55 +0000

Both OpenOffice.org 2.0 and Excel 2007 save natively as Zipped XML files. You can see it yourself by renaming the .ods or .xlsx (for OpenOffice.org 2.0 and Excel 2007 respectivly). With any luck we will see plugins and extentions for our favorites SCM soloutions becomming available soon.

By: Ryan Shwayder

Ryan Shwayder — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 16:52:45 +0000

Great post. I’d personally suggest a combination of database and text files, but I’ve seen it done every way you can imagine.

The nice thing about using text files is that it’s really easy to get at for a designer. You can have all the data on your machine locally and skim through it a lot easier without necessarily knowing what you’re looking for.

It makes searches for data using Textpad (my personal favorite) extremely easy and often faster than databases (as long as you know the general area you’re searching in), not to mention it reads a lot more naturally when you get results.

It also tends to be easier to drop in more Live data without rebooting servers if you’re using text files.

I think the same things can be achieved with databases or text files, but there are advantages and disadvantages to each, so if possible I would combine the two forces for maximum efficiency.

By: Neumann

Neumann — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 23:09:24 +0000

Excel can natively save worksheets as XML files.( ->Save as -> XML document) However, you would need an xsl-t document to put the data in a useful format as the XML spit out by excel has a lot of data that isnt useful except to excel. (It stores the width of the columns and which column was highlighted!)

Another option is using Excel spreadsheets as ODBC datasources.

By: Joe

Joe — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 18:18:33 +0000

As long as your art assets and code are versioned in the SAME database, that’s just fine. Not being able to associate our static data with a particular build bit us often when we were still storing the static data in the database.

By: Richard

Richard — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 07:02:11 +0000

I am not sold on saving data as text files. Let’s say we are talking about game design data, a better method would be to store it versioned in the database. In fact that directly relates to what I consider a big missing entry, the need for a web server built into the game server.

Pretty much everything can be done, and is done, for EVE Online in the web pages its servers provide. Game mastering, game design, administration, introspection, statistics, graphs.. etc.

#10: A friend and I reimplemented how EVE does its modified script reloading and released the code. It can be found here if anyone else is using Python and hasn’t written the same functionality themselves:
http://code.google.com/p/livecoding/

By: Joe

Joe — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 02:28:15 +0000

Have either of you looked into the OpenOffice spreadsheets? They might not have all the functionality of Excel, but maybe they can save and read complex spreadsheets in XML.

By: Sara Jensen

Sara Jensen — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 01:27:39 +0000

Yeah, I’d put the spreadsheets in source control, then write an exporter to turn the spreadsheet’s values into whatever the game needs.

I’ve longed for source-controlled spreadsheets and Excel exporters more than once.

By: Joe

Joe — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 23:36:37 +0000

Heh, I don’t think VisiCalc is necessarily the answer.

We are using Excel for some of our tuning. The designers love it (for obvious reasons). Unfortunately we have no way to get data out of Excel and into files the game can actually read. We could probably come up with something that dumped out the cells into an XML or CSV file and then check both things into source control. Revision histories on Excel files would have been handy on more than one occasion on Pirates. The need for revision histories has never outweighed the benefit of using such a powerful tool, though.

By: Jeff Freeman

Jeff Freeman — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 06:11:00 +0000

Use text files for your data files

So… I like to fiddle with numbers in a spreadsheet. Saving it out as a tabbed text file makes it text, but loses all the forumulas. Simple CELL+CELL sorts, mind.

Do you know if there’s a spreadsheet-lite program that could save the forumas even when the file is saved in a text format?

And doesn’t convert dates to some kind of countdown from the Martian-invasion?

If we went back to VisiCalc on an Apple ][, say?