unsignedqword

Joined 10 years ago

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Comment · 10 years ago
Comment · 10 years ago
Many companies in the games industry have settled on using Perforce or SVN (or more recently Plastic DVCS) internally as, out of the box, it can handle both code and non-code assets (i.e. large binary files) well in tandem. Git has problems with the latter - people have tried to correct this with solutions like git-annex and git-LFS but these have failed to catch on thus far.
Comment · 10 years ago
Kind of - it depends on the artist you talk to. OpenSubdiv utilities have been part of the major 3D packages for about a year or two now, and it's true that they can offer some significant speedup, well-needed in both the games and per-rendered CGI industries where high-poly subd models can easily go up to several million triangles.

Besides the speedup, there is a very interesting feature of OpenSubdiv - local edge creasing. To influence the general creasing or smoothing of a subd mesh, an artist usually has to add more or subtract geometry in an area, respectively - whereas OpenSubdiv gives you the alternative option to assign a crease value to an area of the source mesh which influences the apparent creasing of the resultant mesh in that area without the artist having to add more geo. It works some of the time: not every artist likes using local edge creases but for those that do, it can be a very big help, considering the the occasional difficulty in adding new geometry to a mesh that flows correctly and doesn't accidentally ruin the rest of the mesh.

Comment · 10 years ago
This really doesn't tell me anything about Unity, especially in respect to other solutions.

- Unity is only for games

Who said they were? You can find lots of examples of game engines being used for other applications, such as in Archviz, non-game simulation areas, interactive art, etc.

- You can only do small games with Unity

Again, who said this? If an engine is free and well supported you might find a lot of smaller games on it, but that's not indicative of the engine as a whole. If you're planning on making a large game, the question you'd be asking is not whether you can make a larger game in Unity, but whether it's appropriate for your larger game in particular.

- Unity is worse than Unreal Engine

Now that's a opinion if I've ever heard of one. Also, you don't need to use C++ to use Unreal. UE4 natively supports Blueprint scripting out of the box (I wouldn't recommend making a game completely in a visual programming language to begin with, anyway). Support for interacting with Unreal through other languages (JavaScript, Nim, etc.) has shown significant progress in the community.

- You don’t need programming knowledge to use Unity

Many of the popular free engines nowadays have some form of visual programming feature. You'd be severely hurting yourself trying to accomplish a bigger problem using visual languages only, however.

- All Unity games looks the same

Some gamers enormously conflate a game's art with its engine, which is completely wrong. Bad art will look bad in any environment - any developer would know that.

- Unity has a lot of bugs

That's an incredibly vague statement that you can apply to just about any large software project, not even just game engines.

Comment · 10 years ago
Some (maybe) lesser known gems for Windows machines:

http://www.peazip.org/ - Zipping/Unzipping utility, better than WinRAR or 7-Zip

http://implbits.com/products/hashtab/ - Shell extension that adds a panel in the file properties window that can compute and compare a hash against many different hash functions

http://mactype.net/ - Shell extension that gives various options to modify Windows' anti-aliasing scheme. Useful if you're not a fan of TrueType's look. Can cause noticeable lag and drawing issues on some less powerful systems, though

http://cmder.net/ - Alternative, more-featured terminal emulator for windows (works with both Cmd/PowerShell)

Comment · 10 years ago
Comment · 10 years ago

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