Torchlight II - Three Years of Development

Runic Games released a video showing what Torchlight II went through during its 3 year development.

A gource visualization of nearly three years of development on Runic Games' Torchlight II. The visualization is based on activity in our source control system. Every piece of art, sound, or code that helped shape the game is represented somewhere in the frenzy.

The music is a recently unearthed archaeological selection from the long-distant schoolboy days of a certain Runic Games employee who shall remain nameless to spare he and his cohorts the embarrassment. We welcome your speculation and evidence in the comments.

More information.

I have no idea what I'm looking at here.

Originally Posted by TheMadGamer
I have no idea what I'm looking at here.

It's the final boss in TL2. If you didn't kill it, you didn't finish the game. Go back and play more.

In any large, multi-person project where you're maintaining a large code base of many different files, you often need a revision control system. If you want to make a change, then you need to check out the appropriate files, make your changes, and then check them back into the central repository. Often, two people will try to change the same files, which means that a merge process will take place to merge both branches into the 'head'.

There are many software packages that do this automatically through simple commandlines like 'ci' and 'co' (for check-in and check-out), so what you end up with is every file getting automatically updated with a new version number everytime somebody makes a change.

What this video is showing is a graphical representation of all the updates that were happening to every file in the project over a 3-year period. I believe that each 'node' is a directory, so you're basically seeing a visual representation of the directory tree, and how it changed over time.

Somebody here on my team did the same thing for our big project here at work, so I've seen this kind of visualization once before, but I'm still at a loss as to what purpose it serves. I guess it's just something a code junkie does because he can…

It just tells you that code development by a large team is chaotic and difficult to manage.

They are using Gource, a tool especially created for visualising changes to a repository as explaine by Fantasm.
The video shows they started out with quite a bit of code, probably form the first Torchlight and removed a lot as well before they build upon that. You can see that some parts get bigger and grow while other parts are removed over time.