FreeGameDev

I'm wondering if, given a large collection of these things, what is the meta data an application would need to put together usable pairs.

When I say large collection I'm thinking about user submissions. One person writes twenty shaders while others build models and paint skins. For an application to be able to satisfy a maps request for an "orc, female late twenties or male late teens". The parts would have metadata describing what it is for and enough extra information and data to matchup good pairs.

The main goal is so that these contributors can focus on their area of expertise and leave the mundane details up to an AI.

Moved this to arts and assets.

But I am not sure I understand what you are trying to achieve...

For most games these are tightly interlinked and you can't really have multiple people working on those without directly coordinating it.

Maybe for a game with extremely simple and more or less standardized meshes like Minecraft it could work...

For those meta data in general, many games either use simple text files (quake3 based for example), or more complex ones use .xmls. Of course this can not be generalized as every engine does it a bit differently. Sometimes a custom mesh format is used that includes all this metadata...

The idea is to move the coordination from design time to run time. The goal is to compartmentalise the development, to encourage contribution.

If one can't explain to a computer how this works, perhaps it'd help if you first tried to explain it to a person.

What I've done is to skip using a skin and hard-code vector graphic primitives in GLSL. This is because I'm uncomfortable choosing a specific color and that's basically the entire task of making a skin..