Game development

The twelfth entry is a cadeia de recursos, and the English name for it is not a chain at all. A studio says « the asset pipeline »: the run of steps that takes a drawing or a sound out of the program it was made in and delivers it, converted and compressed, inside the running game. Portuguese pictures links, English pictures a pipe, and the difference is worth holding on to, because that pipe has walked out of the workshop and into ordinary speech. « In the pipeline » now means no more than on the way, under preparation, not yet visible: a publisher has three titles in the pipeline, a minister has reforms in the pipeline, a laboratory has a drug in the pipeline. Nothing is flowing anywhere, and the phrase promises only that work has started and has not finished. Two habits go with it. It is said of things that are expected rather than of things that are merely wished for, so it carries a quiet commitment. And inside the trade it is a verb as well, « to pipeline a task », which means to overlap it with the next one so that nothing sits waiting.