Video game developer

A video game developer is a software developer (a business or an individual) that creates video games. A developer may specialize in a certain video game console, such as Sony's PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360, Nintendo's Wii, or may develop for a variety of systems, including personal computers.

Some developers also specialize in certain types of games, such as computer role-playing games or first-person shooters. Some focus on porting games from one system to another. Some focus on translating games from one language to another. An unusual few do other kinds of software development work in addition to games.

Most video game publishers, such as Electronic Arts, Activision and Sony, maintain development studios. However, as publishing is still their primary activity, they are generally described as "publishers" rather than "developers".

WOW object-manager

The WoW Object Manager is an ingame map editor making it possible to edit the World of -World Of Warcraft. The exiting thing about this editor towards other editors is the fact that it does operate ingame. Since the structure of the enviroment -data in the memory is very similar to the one in the data files it is very easy to convert changes made within the game to the datafiles.

One of the basic features of the WoW Object Manager is to move around objects ingame. Every object *.WMO’s *.M2’s and serverside *.M2’s can be moved around and saveddirectly into the offline *.ADT files. The serve-side objects like NPC’s, mailboxes etc. are stored into a database by their objectID, if WorldOfWarcraft then loads that objectID again the object will be moved to the location defined by the database. Moving objects around also means rotating and scaling them.

Rob Pardo's insight on WoW's development and why PC gaming isn't dead

What's one of the most powerful game design positions in the games industry today? Executive Vice President of Game Design at Blizzard Entertainment, and the monumental role is filled by Rob Pardo. In this sit-down interview with PC Gamer, Pardo addresses various topics including why PC Gaming is far from dead. An easy position to take considering World of Warcraft has 11 million active subscribers. But Pardo understands the pressures companies face when developing on the PC platform. His line of thinking is that PC gaming won't die, but that it's evolving.

When it comes to decision making and managing 140 creative staff members that work on World of Warcraft, Pardo describes an organic and collaborative process. The team is cohesive and there is no dictatorship over creative control as anyone on the team has the power to veto. Pardo admits that this may sound like nothing is accomplished with so many differing perspectives, but the key to content competition is in the team's dynamics, communication and of course compromise. Blizzard also eschews the monolithic design document. Instead Blizzard's creative process is more iterative and chunks of content are scraped but it pushes the whole team to do better with the overall objective to deliver a better product.

The interview covers various other topics including a disagreement in viewpoints with Raph Koster, and why anyone looking to break into game design should second-think their college education choice if majoring in the specialized field.

WOW Development

World of Warcraft was first announced by Blizzard at the ECTS trade show in September 2001.Development of the game took roughly 4-5 years, and included extensive testing. The 3-D graphics in WoW use elements of the proprietary graphics engine originally used in Warcraft III. The game was designed to be an open environment where players are allowed to do what they please.Quests are optional and were designed to help guide players, allow character development, and to spread characters across different zones to try to avoid what developers called 'player collision'.The game interface allows players to customize appearance and controls, and to install add-ons and other modifications.

World of Warcraft runs natively on both Macintosh and Windows platforms. Boxed copies of the game use a hybrid CD to install the game, eliminating the need for separate Mac and Windows retail products. The game allows all users to play together, regardless of their operating system. Although there is no official version for any other platform, support for World of Warcraft is present in Windows API implementations Wine and Cedega, allowing the game to be played under Linux and FreeBSD.