What tool has increased productivity the most / blown the most mind?

For Tyler in QA it was a tool called copybuild. Back in the day, when you needed a build, it was a manual process. connect to network drive, need 'this' folder, 'this' folder, the .exe, etc… it's easy to grab the wrong thing. Eventually they got copybuild. It's basically drop-down menus, I need this build with this version number, I need a dev build or not, etc… made the process easier.

or Bryan – the best tool he's ever used, it's a program called Direct Folders. Bookmark anything on your computer, and it works in browsers as well. Makes him much faster doing his work. Back when he was at ID, there were nested folders within folders. Being able to bookmark folders is awesome, and it's free. For 20$ you get the pro version where you can make nested folders within your bookmarks. Second tool is KUtools for Excel. It does a lot, but Bryan uses it for a way to go into a folder and whatever files are in that folder, or hierarchy of folders, it'll give you all the assets in an excel file. And you can say 'i only want mdx files', or 'I want all files' etc… If someone says 'I want to know what's in the mocap library' he just generates a new list in excel.

Josh – for the ship team, it was the damage shader system. It's why they redo ships. They used to do the damage system differently; you used to build a ship, and then it took forever to build the damage pieces. You'd have a piece – the nose, you'd have pristine, then damage 1, damage 2, damage 3, damage 4, etc… And you'd do that for each piece. If there's 37 pieces to a ship, you had to do all those tiers for each of those, and then you had to do LOD tiers for each one. When the damage shader came online, not only when you shoot a ship it literally puts the hole on the ship, but now they don't have to make damage pieces ever again. It's saved… countless, countless hours. Doing the Connie with that hierarchy could have taken months.