Patent ID: 7836055

Claim:
A method for managing digital game content relationship information associated with a plurality of digital game content files within a content development environment for exposing dependencies between the digital game content files to a content editing process upon request, comprising: providing a data provider application programming interface (API) for communicating between a client process and a server process in the content development environment, the data provider API being configured for use with a game content editing application; generating an asset relationship management file with the data provider API, the asset relationship management file including an asset identifier which uniquely identifies a digital asset and including at least one relationship reference describing a linking or a dependency relationship with at least one other digital asset file; the asset relationship management file being written out by the data provider API from a digital asset being edited by the client content editing process; storing the asset relationship management file to a data store; generating an asset relationship graph based on at least the asset relationship management file, the asset relationship graph comprising a plurality of asset graph nodes, each node corresponding to a particular content file, the asset graph nodes mapping dependency and referential relationships between a plurality of digital game content files, each uniquely identified by a specific asset identifier, thus exposing dependency relationships between the digital game content files to a content editing process upon request; and generating a node tree in the asset relationship graph.