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EA's Best-kept Secret
jkdove writes "GamerGod recently held an interview with top executives at BuildForge and learned a little known trade secret of video game industry giant Electronic Arts' arsenal. Granting the ability to reduce costs of 80 million dollar titles to an only 40 million, there can be little doubt that BuildForge will find its way into many more of the game industry's top production firms. From the article: 'Utilizing BuildForge's capabilities result in dramatic reductions in team workload and build/release cycle time - typically creating 4-20x efficiency improvements over in-house or open source systems. This is what EA is looking to do by bringing in automation, better practices and standards into those process that have been traditionally more free wheeling.'"
Well, bringing some best pratices into any software project cant be a bad thing? Or is this a bad thing (c) because we hate EA?
Kidding, of course, this means they can churn out more dreck with the same number of slaves.
"Something's wrong with you...and I hope we never do meet again." - Deftones When Girls Telephone Boys
They still won't drop game prices a penny.
I've never heard/used/tried BuildForge so I don't know much about it. But this interview sounds like all marketing to me.
_ Schematic.jpg
>With the ability to, for example, take your ten thousand images/graphics and render them on a variety
>of machines at the same time instead of doing it serially, you can make your cycles shorter and get
>your feedback earlier.
Isn't that just a render farm? Are they going to supply with a render farm?!
>Now let's look at what happens when a build fails. Now you have five hundred developers, times the two
>hours of time that was just lost. That equals out to a thousand hours you just wasted.
huh? Build fails does not mean no one can do anything. Just get previous version and continue with what you're doing.
>There[sic] were able to track trends from anything from efficiency of code to the coders themselves."track trends from efficiency of code" This software is going to go through source code and tell me that it can be optimized? For "Any language"? http://www.buildforge.com/images/schematics/RWALM
2) Charge an extra $10 this gen due to "rising game development costs".
3) Profit
Come on this is EA.
1) Take last years Madden NFL and update character stats
2) Charge an extra $10 this gen due to "rising game development costs".
3) Profit
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
"BuildForge provides development automation solutions for Real-World Application Lifecycle Management.
"BuildForge FullControl is a powerful, adaptive framework that allows development teams to automate, integrate, and analyze their development lifecycle using the tools they have in place today."
I copied/pasted that from the BuildForge website. Raise your hand if hearing the above slogans parroted by some annoying MBA in charge of your department would cause you to immediately post your resume on the internet.