707data to be reloaded dynamically into the running game. The specifi c mecha-
nism isn’t important—all that matt ers is that users have a reasonably short
round-trip iteration time (i.e., the time between making a change to the game
world and seeing the eff ects of that change in-game). It’s important to realize
that iterations don’t have to be instantaneous. Iteration times should be com-
mensurate with the scope and frequency of the changes being made. For ex-
ample, we might expect tweaking a character’s maximum health to be a very
fast operation, but when making major changes to the lighting environment
for an entire world chunk, a much longer iteration time might be acceptable.
13.4.2. Integrated Asset Management Tools
In some engines, the game world editor is integrated with other aspects of
game asset database management, such as defi ning mesh and material prop-
erties, defi ning animations, blend trees, animation state machines, sett ing up
collision and physical properties of objects, managing texture resources, and
so on. (See Section 6.2.1.2 for a discussion of the game asset database.)
Perhaps the best-known example of this design in action is UnrealEd , the
editor used to create content for games built on the Unreal Engine. UnrealEd
is integrated directly into the game engine, so any changes made in the editor
are made directly to the dynamic elements in the running game. This makes
rapid iteration very easy to achieve. But UnrealEd is much more than a game
world editor—it is actually a complete content-creation package. It manages
Figure 13.7. UnrealEd’s Generic Browser provides access to the entire game asset database.
13.4. The Game World Editor