Authoring Tools Framework (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 Games’ 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.

ATF is an open source project. See License.txt.

You must have .NET Framework 4.0 or greater installed in order to run the ATF applications. You can download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17851

You must have Windows 7 or later to run the circuit, FSM, statechart, and timeline editors, due to their use of Direct2D.

To use Live Connect, a local network broadcasting service, you must have Bonjour installed. Bonjour is installed with iTunes and some other products. The installers, Bonjour64.msi (for 64-bit Windows) and Bonjour.msi (for 32-bit Windows), can be provided within Sony upon request, and are located in our non-public directory: \NoDistro\ThirdParty\Wws.LiveConnect.

Visual Studio C# 2010 solution files and project files are provided.

To try the ATF sample applications, open and build \Samples\Samples.vs2010.sln. The sample applications' .exe's are placed in the \bin folder.

To build all the samples, development tools, and unit tests, open and build \Test\Everything.vs2010.sln.

Although we don’t ship with any C# compile warnings, we are still shipping with two project warnings that you may see when you open up a couple of our projects in Visual Studio. These are unlikely to cause problems, but here is an explanation for what is happening.

Atf.Core This project has a warning about a possible run-time error due to a mismatch between the processor architecture with Wws.LiveConnect.dll. This is a false warning because this dll is not actually copied to the output directory. (The copy local setting is set to false.) The application’s project, like TimelineEditor, has to reference the correct version of Wws.LiveConnect.dll (x86 or x64). These sample apps provide an example of how to conditionally reference the correct dll based on the target processor architecture. For a future release of ATF, a new Wws.LiveConnect.dll should be available that will target “any CPU”, and so this warning will go away.

Atf.Gui.OpenGL This project has a warning about a possible run-time error due to a mismatch between the processor architecture with DDSUtils.dll. This has been a very long-standing requirement that to use this NVidia utility (like for opening certain image files), you have to target the x86 processor architecture. New clients should use the Direct3D native C++ rendering of the new LevelEditor component in the WWS SDK.

Documentation: https://github.com/SonyWWS/ATF/wiki

Bugs, feature requests, and questions: https://github.com/SonyWWS/ATF/issues