Maven for game development / asset pipelines

Question

I'm just exploring Maven as a build / dependency management tool and it seemed like it would be ideal for managing the (often quite complex!) dependencies in a typical game development scenario.

Some example scenarios:

• Converting 3D assets between formats / applying pre-processing steps to textures
• Rebuilding static in-game data structures such as pathfinding nodes when world maps change
• Handling the quite complex dependencies for platform-specific graphics libraries etc.

Has anyone had any success with this sort of approach?

Answer 1

What are you planning on programming the game in? The Wikipedia article on it suggests support for C++ is limited. Have you considered BuildBot? It's 'Success Stories' page mentions a few games, among other things.

Theoretically, this would allow anyone to write plugins to interface with build tools (compilers, unit test tools, etc.) for any other language. In reality, support and use for languages other than Java has been minimal. Currently a plugin for the .Net framework exists and is maintained [3], and a C/C++ native plugin was at one time maintained for Maven 1.[4]