My circumstances do not make me what I am, they reveal who I have chosen to be. Despite the differences, there are some things that are still very similar to traditional application programming. I am talking about the tools.
Good tools make better games faster.
Anarchy Online uses a range of tools in our development process, many of which are off the shelf, but also many we have developed specifically. The framework takes care of all the 3D stuff the plug-ins should not need to worry about, rendering, move, rotate, etc, as well as all the window and event handling. There are a few basic plug-ins that all the games need and some that are game specific. This way we can more easily reuse technology and plug-ins in new projects, and use upgrades for the new ones in the old, etc. The resource browser is a vital component in tide.