Sony has made its Authoring Tools Framework software (ATF) freely available for developers to download and use under the Apache 2.0 open source license.
ATF is a set of C#/.NET components for making tools on Windows. ATF has been used by most Sony first party game studios to make many custom tools such as Naughty Dog's level editor and shader editor for The Last of Us, Guerrilla Game's sequence editor for Killzone games (including the Killzone: Shadow Fall PS4 launch title), an animation blending tool at Santa Monica Studios, a level editor at Bend Studio, a visual state machine editor for Quantic Dream, sound editing tools, and many others. ATF has been in continuous development in Sony's Worldwide Studios central tools group since early 2006.
"We’re looking forward to expanding ATF’s usage beyond SCE, working more with external PlayStation developers and the larger game development community as a whole," said Ron Little, SCEA's principal tools programmer. "Now that ATF is open source, we’re excited to see the ways developers use the toolset, which could expand beyond games."
The ATF toolset is readily available on Github.
