The trouble with project is that the damn thing hardly ever works. How many times have you releveled and found a task that refuses to move for what seems to be no reason, forcing you to move things by hand.

Microsoft has a much simpler PM program once called Team Manager, which worked and was ideal. Unfortunately they stopped supporting it after 97, directing all resources on to Project.

I''m surprised nobody has mentioned Alienbrain in the context of this thread. Isn''t it a project management package designed specifically for game development??

quote: Original post by JonnyBoy
The trouble with project is that the damn thing hardly ever works. How many times have you releveled and found a task that refuses to move for what seems to be no reason, forcing you to move things by hand.

Hmpf... whenever I had a problem, I always managed to find out why it was there - and was usually a more logical reason than I thought.



Dave Mark
Intrinsic Algorithm Development
"Reducing the world to mathematical equations!"

Where can I find more info on Alienbrain? I''ve never heard of it, but it sounds interesting.

Thanks,
Charles Galyon

They did a review of Alienbrain at gamasutra.com a while back, so check it out over there.

Black Edge Games

Edited by - cwarwick on March 3, 2002 2:48:41 PM

www.alienbrain.com

Excerpt:

NXN is the leading supplier of Digital Production Management (DPM) solutions for development teams in the fast-growing interactive entertainment, new media and animation markets. We provide software and expertise to top companies like Sony Online Entertainment, Electronic Arts and Infogrames.

Using our solutions these industry leaders are improving their work processes and increasing the productivity of their development teams.


Edited by - Tacit on March 3, 2002 7:46:55 PM

quote: Original post by InnocuousFox
Read the article. He''s a moron and obviously has one or both of the following traits:

1) He is an unorganized, undisciplined loose cannon.
2) He has no clue as to how to use Project to it''s highest ability.

Read the rest of his articles on that site, and his resumè. He might be opinionated, but he''s clearly not a moron.



The computer was conceived as a tool to reduce complexity. Some people found this loss of complexity unacceptable, and developed UNIX to reintroduce it.

I had thought that Alienbrain was just an asset management/version control tool, like clearcase or sourcesafe.

Yes AlienBrain is an asset manager, handling both code and gfx. We had them demo it at our place, it was very good, but expensive.

If I remember correctly it was something like £5000 for the server module, and £1500 pound per seat. £=$1.45 (ish).

The intention is that every team member (gfx and code) would require a seat.

Roll your own! At least for code, the Mozilla system works very well. You have CVS for code storage and versioning, Bugzilla for feature and bug tracking, LXR (modified) to view code over an intranet or the internet, Tinderbox (to test whether it''ll build or burn), and Bonsai (for tree control -- get it?).

While art/music/whatever asset management is missing, I''m sure that there are free and open systems for that, too. If you can''t find one on SourceForge, then rig up your own as a layer on top of CVS.

Lastly, managing people on the project can be done with something as simple as a web-based groupware project such as phpGroupWare on Apache or similar systems. The best should support calendar synchronization and management adhering to the iCalendar RFCs. Once the Mozilla Calendar meets it''s requirements (we''re hoping so soon), you have your complete group management system.

There''s no way I''d be paying in to the tens of thousands for project management when with a little elbow grease, I can have something just as strong, completely modifiable, and completely free.

Plus, if you find and fix problems, you can make contributions back to the people managing the components of your management system.

Thus is the glory of open source. Which I support, because it can cut costs without much loss of efficiency. Do your part, and support it too.


Chris ''coldacid'' Charabaruk <ccharabaruk@meldstar.com> <http://www.meldstar.com/~ccharabaruk/>
Meldstar Studios <http://www.meldstar.com/> - Creation, cubed.

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