Original Post
Hey, I've been in the industry for a bit over a year now and have a fair idea of how most things work, but one thing I think I could improve on personally is the organizational/process side of special effects programming. Thought I'd post on this forum to see if anyone has any ideas or experience of how this can be done effectively and with minimal hassle. My experience is that you often get issues with fx programming because of the nature of the relationship between art and code... artists naturally have the best idea & often authority of how things should 'look and feel' (particularly the art lead of course); but with fx programming, a lot more control is in the hands of the programmer responsible. Whereas with a 3d model, the artists & animators control pretty much every aspect of how something looks in the game, with fx they might just produce some particles or something else trivial then the coder will do the rest. I've been thinking about the whole 'cabal' model used by Valve, where an artist might pair off with a programmer for a kind of intense development relationship of the effect... but I'm not really sure what the best way of doing things are. So my question to people who've worked in a medium-large size gamedev team is, what do you think the best way of organizing the process of effect development is, in terms of who's involved, who has the final say, how things are best scheduled, and what kind of QA would be involved? Any feedback or further discussion on this topic is very welcome, I'd love to hear from people who've worked on effects a lot in gamedev. Thanks :)