NXN Software, the leader in digital asset management solutions, recently acquired by Avid Technology, will introduce alienbrain Studio 7 at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, California, on March 24-26 (booth #423). The new generation of the award-winning alienbrain Studio is designed to allow creative teams to significantly improve their performance through process optimizations, enhanced usability and innovative feature upgrades, including new change management functionality.
Version 7 provides more than 40 new features focused on performance enhancement for creative teams, including:
* Change sets that enable a structured approach to complex projects
* Multi-threading support to leverage hardware resources and balance the workload in peak times
* An integrated Reference Manager that provides an instant overview of 3D scenes and their related files directly in alienbrain Studio
* A new Windows Integration Framework (WIF) that significantly simplifies the integration of third-party and proprietary tools into the alienbrain workflow
* A new Central Configuration Server that simplifies administration by using existing directory services, such as Windows NT domains or LDAP, to enable a true single sign-on solution
"The games industry continues to evolve from small teams to larger teams that require enterprise-level software infrastructures," said Gregor vom Scheidt, managing director at Avid with responsibility for the alienbrain product line. "Version 7 of alienbrain Studio was designed to uniformly support programmers, artists and managers regardless of team size."
New change set functionality enables users to unite all files that are associated with a single change request in one logical change set instead of making changes to the software product on individual files. Once all required modifications are completed, the entire change set is submitted to the server in an "atomic" transaction, either transferring all changes at once or not at all. This mechanism ensures that the server always stores a consistent set of data.
With version 7, many of the core components of alienbrain Studio have been restructured to optimize work processes across teams. By offering multi-threading support, the system now leverages multi-processor machines and hyper-threaded systems. This accelerates complex processing and provides reliable scalability as team size grows. A new storage management system adds more flexibility to archiving and removes project size restrictions. Finally, the new Central Configuration Server simplifies project administration by utilizing existing user directories to enable single sign-on solutions.
The open architecture of alienbrain Studio 7 allows flexible customization for different processes and easy integration into an existing IT landscape. As a result, game development studios now have greater flexibility in tying their own tools to the asset management back-end provided by alienbrain Studio 7 with the new Windows Integration Framework (WIF). This C++ Software Development Kit (SDK) offers a flexible infrastructure for the integration of any Windows application with alienbrain Studio.
Scripts and batch procedures can now use nearly 70 commands in the command-line client to unleash the full potential of the alienbrain system.
For customers that run their productions on multiple operating systems, alienbrain Studio 7 offers near feature parity of Mac OS X, Linux and Windows clients.
The new version is expected to be available in mid-April. For pricing information, please visit the purchase section on www.nxn-software.com.
Avid Technology Inc. is a world leader in digital nonlinear media creation, management and distribution solutions, enabling film, video, audio, animation, games and broadcast news professionals to work more efficiently, productively and creatively. For more information about the company's award-winning products and services, please visit: www.avid.com.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
