What is a Tools Engineer!?

Hi there! My name is Ryan Hummer, and I am a Tools Engineer here at Raven. I’m going to give you some insight into exactly what a Tools Engineer is and some of the things I do day to day here at Raven. For a bit of a background, I’ve been here at Raven for six years working on Tools for games like Quake 4, Wolfenstein, Singularity, and unannounced titles.

Question: What would you say ya do here?

That’s a very good question! To answer that I say I do a lot of things. I deal with ‘customer support,’ writing new tools, fixing up existing tools, enhancing existing tools. Those are just a few of the most common things that I do as a Tools Engineer. Wait customer support? Doesn’t that mean you sit at a phone and try to help people?

No, it doesn’t mean that. It means if consumer’s are having problems using any tool, they find an issue with a tool, or like to make the tool crash. I try to help figure out if something is wrong with the tool, or if they are not using a feature correctly to cause their issues.  There can be a significant amount of time spent helping consumers of the tools understand how to use them.  Especially if they are new to the toolset, if they are new to the studio and never used the engine or toolset we are using or there is a transition to a new engine and tool set at the studio.  There is also the flip side where I need to know from the consumers of the tool what works and what doesn't work for them.  That could mean, maybe feature a is a bit too cumbersome to use.  Or maybe the result of the feature isn't as clear as it should be, or the interface that wraps the feature is hard to use.  There is also the other part where everything works great and the consumer loves the feature.  These things are very important to know. If there are things that are not working right they should be addressed quickly, because they may be acting as a bottleneck for customers and slowing down their work, which in turn can slow down others’ work.

Fixing/Extending existing tools

This is another important part of what I do. We all know humans are not perfect, so any code I write is probably not going to be perfect the first time I write it.  As much as I try there are going to be issues with new features and tools that are developed. There are probably some cases we didn’t account for which produce bugs. A lot of this information comes from the customer support side, while some of it can come from my actual use of the tool or digging around in the code working on other things. Fixing bugs in existing tools is usually a great way to improve productivity. Consumers are good at finding workarounds to bugs, but those can sometimes be costly in terms of time spent, so fixing those can be a huge time saver. Extending a tool is similar to fixing it. A tool may be lacking a feature that would help speed up the consumer’s work flow.

Writing new tools

Sometimes on a well-established engine, there may be the need for a new tool because either, the requirements for this feature or tool are outside the scope of existing tools, or some Engineer added some new system or tech to that requires a new tool to let the consumer get the data into the game for the new system or tech.  This can involve working with the Engineer who created the new system or tech to create the tool.  We may work together while the system or tech is still being written or the tool may be requested after the system or tech has been written and deployed to the team.

So there you have it, a small window into what I do here at Raven as a Tools Engineer. I wanted to keep this first entry short, so expect a few more entries from me about Tools Engineering.