[RuneLancer]

Developement tools are a part of the unevitable yet undiscussed process behind game developement. Let's face it, you just can't start work on a big project and avoid using programs OTHER than your IDE and/or compiler to come up with a finished result.

Here's my attempt to get a little discussion started about these.

Personally, I just use VB to rig up something basic to suit my needs on a case by case basis. For instance, in developping Endless Saga's sprites, I needed a means of averaging out two colors to create an intermediate color to make smooth gradients. I use TileStudio Pro as a sprite editor and, while it has decent gradient tools, it can't combine two colors outside its palette. So I just rigged up a small, non-invasive, WS_TOPMOST program with two fields, each of which can take the current color being used in TSP (via getpixel). A third button just averages them out.

Dev time? 10-15 minutes, if even that. Amount of times used? Countless.

'Course, it's not always that simple. The format ES uses for its graphics is a custom one. To boot, textures are grouped in a special archiving format. This means I HAD to write a tool to do this for me as no image editor can neither use my format nor archive them (for very obvious reasons.) But after the christmas demo release (which featured more winter-themed textures), I REALLY got a chance to appreciate the ease with which it let me come up with a new set of textures. It made the couple of hours spent writing and debugging it worthwhile indeed.

So how does everyone deal with these things? Any pros/cons relating to the poll's options you want to share?
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Endless Saga
An OpenGL RPG in the making. Now with new hosting!

[Nodtveidt]

I generally tend to develop all of my utilities myself for PC projects. For PCE projects, I do use one third-party utility, mappy. But even that will change soon. I find that writing your own utilities is better because you don't have to adhere to someone else's methodology.
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If you play a Microsoft CD backwards you can hear demonic voices. The scary part is that if you play it forwards it installs Windows. - wallace

[Rainer Deyke]

I use third party tools if I can find them, and write my own in Python/PyGame if I need to. Right now I have, in addition to my custom map editor that does thing which no other map editor can do, a script that compiles and links my program, compiles my data files, combines my data files into my custom resource file format, and builds my installers for me, all from a single comand line invocation.

(BTW, if you mean this TileStudio, it does have the ability to mix colors built in. Just draw one pixel in the first color, turn on the "add colors" mode, and draw a pixel in the other color on top of the first pixel.)

[RuneLancer]

Huh. I guess you learn something new everyday. XD
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Endless Saga
An OpenGL RPG in the making. Now with new hosting!

[white_door]

generally it tough for me to answer that poll, as will I hunt around for a third party tool generally first. No point in re-inventing the wheel unless you want need a new kind of wheel or you want wheel making experence. If I can't find anything that fits my needs or design.. then I'll code something. Of course sometimes a tool works fairly well but you just need to add like on or two things before you can use it, that's where open source tools are great.