Sean Tracy · Managing Director of Technical Operations

Well, honestly, if you count how many tools I've made, it's not nearly as many as how many CTG has made, right? And we're easily hundreds and hundreds of different tools, scripts, because it's like, what's a tool? Is it an executable? Is it a Python script? Is it a Python script within Maya? Is it a MEL script in Maya? Is it a Max script? We've got so many. Tech Art has a whole bunch. We've got CTG tools. We've got engineering tools. We've got designer tools. We've got production tools. I've got my Frame.io to Jira tool recently. So there's honestly probably upwards of a thousand. But it all depends on what the function of that given tool is, because what a tool here is designed to be is to force multiply somebody doing something, whatever that may be. And a lot of times it's to speed things up. That is probably how I spend most of my day, trying to figure out how much faster a person can go if I made a process easier for them, if I put something in front of them that made a lot of sense. So a lot.

And we've got entire teams dedicated to even different areas of the tools. Like just alone on the editor, right? We've got a team for the editor. It's not a gigantic team, but it's a very, very busy one. Again, there's thousands of tools just in the editor. Maintaining the Python implementation in the editor, maintaining all the plugins within the editor, whether that's a character tool, whether that's a Mannequin tool, whether that's the Universe Outliner, whether that's level design tools. So there's a whole bunch that happens there. So that's one team. Then we've got another team that works on kind of global tools. It's CTG Tools UK. Yeah, I know, right? It's super uninventive. The cheekier names get confusing, though. That's the only problem, right? So they work on kind of the global tools for all the developers. So this is anything outside the editor they tend to work on. So a good example is CopyBuild. When I got to this company, there was literally no way to download a build to your computer. You had to open up our Perforce, and I'm not sure everybody knows Perforce, but it's our source control repository management, and you would sync everything. Everything, everything. And you would launch it. And I was like, crazy. So they then got a build system. Great. Okay, so now the thing runs through a build and it makes a little package, an artifact. And the best thing they had was just copy-paste from network onto a local drive. Okay. So we have evolved, obviously, to, honestly, just as good as any other company that's out there in terms of our backend build infrastructure and our distribution, which is what CopyBuild does. So CopyBuild does the patching, does all this kind of work. So basically, almost everybody that is going to be working on the game runs CopyBuild. So they work on that. They also work on a very, very big tool called DataForge. And a lot of people will come on here and talk about DataCore or DataForge records or entity records or whatever. That is the tool that manages those. It's huge. There's a lot to it. There's a lot of data. And there's a lot of interfacing in that data that people do. I'm just rattling off a whole bunch of them, but that is what those guys work on, generally overall.

Then we have a newer team, a little bit newer, Montreal Tools. And Montreal Tools works on StarChitect, first of all. That's been discussed quite a bit, I think, especially with the new planets on the way. And that's going to be the way to propagate the locations out in a less manual way than we've been doing it. Because it's the only way that we're going to be able to scale, but that is when things are going to ramp up like crazy location-wise. That's going to get a lot faster.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

We just delivered two star systems in the same calendar year. This is going to take us to the next level.

Sean Tracy · Managing Director of Technical Operations

Exactly. And it's all part of Genesis, which is great. So they're working on that. They also work on some density profilers within the engine. We're also working on a system called Tiny Machine, which is a smart asset system. I don't want to get too into details on it, but smart assets are cool. It's basically, as you move something around the environment, it actually has contextual awareness of what it's doing. Just a super simple example is if I put a ladder up to a wall, it'll adjust to that wall depending on what that height is. That way, the level designers, it's not like, oh, I need the 10 meter ladder, I need the 15 meter ladder, I need the six. They just put a ladder there and it's tall enough and it works, right? That's kind of the idea with Tiny Machine, but it'll go much, much broader than that. So I think that'll append to StarChitect, but that's all kind of within its own realm. And then even beyond that, we have the online services tool team, the OST, and the Live Tools team, which works on a tool in our backend called Bootstrapper, which is basically the way that we run our environment without having to send it up to AWS. So you can kind of run the environment locally now. It's getting harder and harder to do that because our universe is bigger and bigger. So trying to run those servers on just a local PC can take a lot of memory. So if you're a developer and you're running Max, Maya, Editor, the client and Bootstrapper, it can get a little heavy. But there's all sorts of things going on with that. So there's a bunch of different tool teams that are helping the developers make this game happen, basically.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

When you put the self-adjusting ladder and stuff in, will they still yeet people out of their ship and across the galaxy?

Sean Tracy · Managing Director of Technical Operations

I hope not. But you know what that comes down to? And it is a thing that this fixes, is that comes down to different implementations. So like, okay, somebody made a ladder entity at some point...

Sean Tracy · Managing Director of Technical Operations

Anyways, yeah, so that's a lot of tools. A lot of tools get made. And again, a tool is just as much a process as it is a tool. Sometimes the best tools are just rejiggering somebody's process a little bit. And it can work things out.