Argh!

[Kojack]

If I have one more non programming student say to me "our game would be finished already if we used unity instead of ogre" I'm going to snap.


Especially when their reasons include that ogre has no terrain system or any kind of scene editor.
(Then when I show them ogre's terrain demo running they say "that's not an ogre program, you are running unity")
*sigh*


Anybody else got some quick rants they want to vent? (not just about unity or education, anything is valid)

[cybereality]

Ha! With me it would be if one more person asks when their developer kit it going to ship. AaaAAaA!!!!!!!!!

[shadowfeign]

When I was in school, I remember the game art students having to take a simple programming class(I was an animation student). The class used some form of basic that supported 3d. It always sounded like such a waste of time(it probably was), and I always felt that if they really needed a bit of programming knowledge under their belt to better communicate or understand programmers in their future teams, it would make more sense to learn maxcript or mel(or i'll add python to the list now, though didn't know anything about it back then), something they could directly use to improve their art. Looking back now, I realize the class could have(though probably didn't) helped teach a lot of things like batch count, submeshes, rigging for games, dealing with multiple uv coordinates, help understand that max and maya do a lot under the hood to make things seem one way, even though they are really not true. Like combining multiple vertices into a single one for ease of use. oh, unit vs scale would be a good topic. Actually, I remember doing an internship where we had one team member think he was reducing poly count by combining the faces in edit poly mode in max, which would report the number or n sided polys, where edit mesh in max reported number of tri's instead, and even though it seemed like common sense to me, there are a lot of things like that I think would benefit artists learning.

[insider]

Well I have Unity installed on my computer but I still prefer programming in Ogre.
Ogre + addons is the best game engine that I have come across and by far the most interesting engine that I have ever used.
In my opinion its complexity right from building it to getting your first project done is what makes it so addicting.
Any 10 year old kid can program using Unity, the same kid would have a nervous breakdown if he was asked to just build and run Ogre and that's what makes Ogre unique, its for those who dare to use it

[Kojack]

I should point out that it would be fine for them to use unity (we've got 5 unity teams and 2 ogre teams). But they have c++ coders on the team who chose to use ogre.
And it's just two people, but they complain every week!

[Klaim]

I have a blog article I didn't finish/publish yet which explains definitively why I can't used Unity (or any complete game engine actually) for my current game. And what it costs me, to be fair.

[Herb]

I played with Unity a bit a year or two back....but, when you use it, you get the feeling you're just scripting in a defined SDK (which you are). You have to work in those set parameters and I think it's only C#? When the frustration is more about what menu (and where) in the UI of unity to do something instead of in code, that's when I'm ready to toss it out the window...

[kneeride]

Hi guys,

I've thought about using unity many times because I'm developing with c# atm but I could never make the move because of the pro price tag. In fact I can't see why so many indie developers don't have a problem with it.

Being cross platform is very important to me so unity becomes very expensive. Pro + iOS + android + flash = $6,000. (I know they no longer support flash but this was a deal breaker for me at the time I was looking). I could probably get away with the lite versions which I think would have been (450 * 2 = 1350 for IOS, android and flash). The lite version however have a big gotcha where they don't strip the build on mobile and I've been told on their forums a vanilla unstripped build will be 15-30 MB. I might have been able to get away with that but that's a big download size starting point for mobile - and I don't think casual gamers would accept this either.

Now I realise that most indie developers would be using the free version on their first projects and then see where they go from there once they're established. I on the other hand could not justify spending 6000K (is that per developer??) when I need to build the final release.

Of course you get what you pay for but I do think that it leaves serious room for competition.

[c6burns]

This thread definitely made me chuckle!

I gave Unity an honest shot, and I think it's quite well done for what it is. For myself, I just couldn't be beholden to license fees per platform and I certainly couldn't afford a source license for unity/cryengine/unigine/anythingyoucouldname ... not to mention Ogre stands up decently to those. I strongly identify with the programmers who chose Ogre in order to work with C++ and I've taught many a non-coder how to appreciate Lua

It must hurt Ogitor contributors deep in the heart to hear people say Ogre lacks a decent scene editor. I was blown away by the quality of Ogitor when first checking out Ogre as an option for my own projects.

[Faranwath]

Anybody else got some quick rants they want to vent? (not just about unity or education, anything is valid)

Well, I honestly hate rants about programming languages. Every time I find some guy's blog with a post along the lines of "Why you shouldn't use imperative languages" or "Friends don't let friends use C++", I know better than to keep reading...

[Klaim]

Well Unity is still excellent for prototyping or when you're doing something with classic base of game structure (which I'm not).
Even with limitations, it's a complete asset pipeline and tools and it's better than, say, Flash for making games quickly.
That's basically the reasons why a lot of indies goes with Unity: you can get to something that work quickly.

Unfortunately, it's still a tool, so not a silver bullet for game dev, and licencing is a problem too (big part of why I can't use it: most features I would need needs licencing AND fighting the system).

So, it's really filling a big big niche of users frustrated to have to learn technical details that are not really about games, and really it's a good thing.
But it's still a tool and just can't match all game devs expectations (even without the licencing issues).

[Transporter]

I use Ogre for research at the university (http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=77739). But now we have a new system with 6 beamer instead of two and I have a lot of trouble to get it working (http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=79170). I'll try Ogre 2.0 from gsoc but if it's not working better I have no choice and I have to change the render engine.

[Kojack]

Ha! With me it would be if one more person asks when their developer kit it going to ship. AaaAAaA!!!!!!!!!

Yeah, I feel sorry for Oculus. So many people in a rush!
"It's not shipping fast enough"
"Why is the api c++?"
"I don't like the courier you use"
"Why did someone in another country get theirs before me, but my order number was lower?"
"Why aren't more shipped to non americans?"
"Why aren't more shipped to americans?"
"Why don't they let us know the progress every week?"
"Why aren't deliveries matching the spreadsheet?"

Speaking of which, I really need to get back to my ogre oculus code. I updated it the other day (not released yet) to sdk 0.2.4, but 0.2.5 then came out.


Anyway... I'm not ranting about Unity itself. It's a very successful product and I've seen some great things done in it (I really need to get back to Rochard, that's a great game). I even taught a class on Unity the other day (the regular unity teacher was sick). I also try hard to not be negative about any 3d engines on here, as an Ogre representative I don't like breeding hostility within the gfx community or make it seem like we are hostile, especially since other engines like visual 3d, jmonkey and irrlicht support our model format.

The real issue is that to me, an artist telling a programmer "we'd be finished already if you used unity instead of ogre" is similar to a programmer telling an artist "the art would be finished if you used MakeHuman instead of Blender or 3DS Max". MakeHuman is great and can generate a human model much faster and probably better looking than a student artist with blender could, but fast development isn't always the point. Instead the point might be flexibility, control or gaining lower level skills.

[areay]

Kojack, I think you're in a pretty unique position as you're a lecturer/instructer/teacher-type person who's (effectively) working for a bunch of young(?) students who are paying to get levelled-up in the games industry.

I hang-out a bit on Slashdot, regularly on this forum there stories where other educators in the tertiary sector relate that students doing CompSci or Software Engineering papers complain that they're not learning the in-vogue programming language . The types of complaints are things like "Why are we using Java? Ruby-on-rails is what employers want right now!". And all sorts of combinations following that format. I see a pretty strong parallel with what you're describing.

Out of interest, at the start of your semester do you get all "meta" on them and talk about learning the theory vs training for a product?

For my part, when I started out making HAL http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=76329 using Ogre3D my primary goal was to learn how 3D games work, Ogre3D looked like a great candidate for this because it lets you get so close to the metal. I know that *we* all know what Ogre3D is, and isn't, so I'll stop there. If I had wanted to learn how to use UDK/Unity/CryEngine or some other turnkey engine I'm sure that I would have missed out on a whole bunch of understanding.

My art guy is good and although he initially wanted to use Unity what we've found is that the artist's job is never complete and programming is progressing far quicker than the art is.

As far as anecdotes go; A few months ago I was working on ragdolls for my game. I spent about 20 hours adapting the Bullet demo for ragdolls, wiring it up to my models and then painstakingly tuning positions/orientations (in a horrible code-and-test style) before getting it working well. Net result, a better understanding of Bullet constraints and Ogre's skeleton/bone system and a working effect. I then went and looked at some youtube examples of ragdolls for comparison and found a Unity3D tutorial on the subject. The tutorial was about 2 minutes long, it involved clicking to download (buying?) some sort of Unity package, checking the checkbox to magically integrate it all then mapping bones to physics primitives by graphically drag-n-dropping boxes over the model. That was it, so easy... but did the student really learn anything?

[c6burns]

As far as anecdotes go; A few months ago I was working on ragdolls for my game. I spent about 20 hours adapting the Bullet demo for ragdolls, wiring it up to my models and then painstakingly tuning positions/orientations (in a horrible code-and-test style) before getting it working well. Net result, a better understanding of Bullet constraints and Ogre's skeleton/bone system and a working effect. I then went and looked at some youtube examples of ragdolls for comparison and found a Unity3D tutorial on the subject. The tutorial was about 2 minutes long, it involved clicking to download (buying?) some sort of Unity package, checking the checkbox to magically integrate it all then mapping bones to physics primitives by graphically drag-n-dropping boxes over the model. That was it, so easy... but did the student really learn anything?

Funny, I am doing exactly what you describe right now. It's painful, but I'm learning so much about constraints and performance vs. accuracy in bullet. Eventually I'll give the dynamica plugin in maya a try, to see how artists could deal with setting up physical objects and constraints. I have used one of the unity ragdoll creators you are talking about as well. It takes about a minute to figure out even without the video .. you pick bones and it creates physical primitives and constraints for you. As a student, I would choose the framework that allows me the opportunity to learn the most in my field of interest. If that field is high level design, or asset creation I could see why some choose Unity. It works well and it keeps the details out of your hair. For low level engine/rendering structure, you'd want something different. Also you might *need* something other than a turnkey engine based on the mechanics of your game.

The real bummer is the misunderstandings between technical and non-technical personnel exist in every workplace I've ever been. And it's not just "our game would be done if the coders chose Unity" or "Why does feature X only take 2 days, but feature Y takes 2 weeks ... they must be sandbagging". It goes the other way too (eg. "Why does management take 2 months to figure out how feature X should work", or "Why does department X need feature Y and Z to change this late in the development cycle. They have no idea what they are doing!")

[EricB]

Be happy that you teach people who can program.

I teach complex task such as double clicking, right clicking, and how to type a web address into an address bar instead of typing it into a search engine.

Luckily I teach Small Basic over the summer which saves some of my sanity, but still, only 10% ever really grasp it.

Did I mention I teach 12-18 year olds? They have had computers around their whole life! This cellphone generation sucks.

[Kojack]

I teach complex task such as double clicking, right clicking,

That just got me thinking... I don't think I've even seen a program that has double right clicking.

I've talked to a couple of game industry project managers, one thing they've had in common is believing students shouldn't use things like ogre (they've specifically told me that), and absolutely not write their own engine. Instead they say to just use unity, udk or similar (if I had to pick one like that, I'd go for CryEngine because it has C++ and Lua, although needing online DRM to run an editor is stupid) so the game is easier and faster to make. That's fine for making money (as long as they don't run into problems that require more advanced skills to solve). But in my opinion a student who has assembled an engine using something like ogre (or irrlicht/open scene graph/etc) has learned far more about software engineering than a student who has made a more polished looking game in unity using some asset store plugins and built in features. As a programmer I know which I'd pick at a job interview.

Then again, I'd tell students not to write their own physics engine, just use Bullet/Newton/PhysX/Havok. There's varying degrees of doing things yourself vs using existing resources.

[lingfors]

I teach complex task such as double clicking, right clicking,

That just got me thinking... I don't think I've even seen a program that has double right clicking.

I've talked to a couple of game industry project managers, one thing they've had in common is believing students shouldn't use things like ogre (they've specifically told me that), and absolutely not write their own engine. Instead they say to just use unity, udk or similar (if I had to pick one like that, I'd go for CryEngine because it has C++ and Lua, although needing online DRM to run an editor is stupid) so the game is easier and faster to make. That's fine for making money (as long as they don't run into problems that require more advanced skills to solve). But in my opinion a student who has assembled an engine using something like ogre (or irrlicht/open scene graph/etc) has learned far more about software engineering than a student who has made a more polished looking game in unity using some asset store plugins and built in features. As a programmer I know which I'd pick at a job interview.

Then again, I'd tell students not to write their own physics engine, just use Bullet/Newton/PhysX/Havok. There's varying degrees of doing things yourself vs using existing resources.

I'm sure there are professors out there saying "If I have one more student say to me 'our game would be finished already if we used ogre instead of OpenGL/DirectX' I'm going to snap. "

Actually, my old graphics / game programming professor was a kind of OpenGL fanatic...

[Kojack]

Very true.

But we must draw the line in the sand somewhere.

In fact, back in 2004-2005 there was resistance to my promotion of Ogre at my college, for the opposite reason to my rant above. Students had previously (199x - 2003) been making their projects in straight OpenGL or Direct X from scratch. But most students spent their whole time just trying to get rendering working (it was a shorter course back then). I pushed for Ogre for the new bachelor degree we were rolling out. I wasn't even a teacher back then, just a night lab tutor.
There was some resistance:
"Ogre is too hard to build" (the teacher stopped saying that after I showed him that it was literally "unzip source, unzip deps, double click the workspace, press f7")
"It's not a game engine" (I said we could add components like ODE, Fmod and others to it)
"We should be using Auran Jet" (One of our senior programming teachers worked at Auran, the Brisbane company behind the 1997 rts Dark Reign. Auran Jet was a $100 game engine that sucked badly).
But we gave it a try... and won the indie game contest at the 2004 australian game developer conference (the game was Scooterama). Then I got called into a meeting to justify why we should be giving students a basic framework (ogre with ode mainly), was it making things too easy for them? I was able to convince them otherwise.

So I've watched it go from "ogre is too hard for students" to "ogre is too easy for students" to "ogre is too time consuming for students". Meanwhile I just keep on using it (and we won another 3 indie game awards).

[ppClarity]

College students will always whine about why they're not being trained in the flavor-of-the-month tools. (For me it was: FORTRAN? Why not C?) The thing is we weren't there to be taught a language. Languages come and go. Any competent engineer should be able to pick up a new syntax within two weeks. It may be trite, but it's true: The school is there to teach you how to learn and it did that by teaching the fundamentals.

As for rapid development tools... anybody have any experience with Leadwerks? If I knew about their Linux port Kickstarter I certainly would have added a pledge.

[c6burns]

(For me it was: FORTRAN? Why not C?)

I wouldn't have minded Fortran. Back in the day my University did introductory programming in Pascal When I tried to transfer into programming as a major they were worried I wouldn't be able to handle the Java coursework. I guess not having to use pointers or manage memory allocation is daunting

Languages come and go. Any competent engineer should be able to pick up a new syntax within two weeks.

I was fortunate enough to have a teacher in high school that allowed us to complete our work in C or C++ as opposed to Q Basic, and during those formative years I learned everything I needed about programming and how executables actually run. While I agree that languages come and go, I'm glad I was able to grasp the concepts of a lower level language early on with the help of an instructor. It's easier (in my mind) to go from low level to high level than vice-versa.

[Kojack]

Still haven't snapped, but closer.
Yesterday, walk into final project room at 8:50am: "Ogre particle lab is crap. It just crashes all the time". When trying to show me how much it crashes, it failed to crash a single time and ran fine.
This morning, 8:40am: "Ogre is horrible, it takes too long to make anything, it's useless for final projects".

That student gave me an unpleasant glare when they mentioned that they wished Unity could do holes in terrain and I said that ogre's volume terrain can do it. I feel better now.

[c6burns]

Still haven't snapped, but closer.
Yesterday, walk into final project room at 8:50am: "Ogre particle lab is crap. It just crashes all the time". When trying to show me how much it crashes, it failed to crash a single time and ran fine.

I crashed the CryEngine3 sandbox almost every day I used it!

That student gave me an unpleasant glare when they mentioned that they wished Unity could do holes in terrain and I said that ogre's volume terrain can do it. I feel better now.

It's the little moments in life that make it all worthwhile

[PhilipLB]

That student gave me an unpleasant glare when they mentioned that they wished Unity could do holes in terrain and I said that ogre's volume terrain can do it. I feel better now.

Yay. I whish I had more time to put some work into it.

All in all I agree with the conclusion that you have to take that step in your mind: "It's just a tool, maybe tomorrow it's a different one.".
I started my Bachelors in 2005 and the first programming course was actually taught in Turbo Pascal. At first, this seems weird, but you have all the needed concepts (without OOP) to get started and nothing is in your way. Then in the 2nd semester, it was Delphi with more structure (no OOP yet, Delphi is more than capable of it, just not allowed). Third semester raw C and Java. From there on, most of the projects where written in C or in "whatever you prefer". The Computer Graphics courses used all raw C and OpenGL. Never touched a game engine there...
I think this was a very fine way to teach as we implemented most of the basic data structures in C and actually know now, why string concatenation is so expensive etc.. And we got used to see what engines/frameworks/libraries are, just tools that come and go.

Are you teaching a CG class and the projects are games because they use CG? Or are you teaching a game-programming class? If it's CG, I would actually think that Ogre hides too much stuff and you miss many basics.

[NotCamelCase]

I teach complex task such as double clicking, right clicking,

That just got me thinking... I don't think I've even seen a program that has double right clicking.

I've talked to a couple of game industry project managers, one thing they've had in common is believing students shouldn't use things like ogre (they've specifically told me that), and absolutely not write their own engine. Instead they say to just use unity, udk or similar (if I had to pick one like that, I'd go for CryEngine because it has C++ and Lua, although needing online DRM to run an editor is stupid) so the game is easier and faster to make. That's fine for making money (as long as they don't run into problems that require more advanced skills to solve). But in my opinion a student who has assembled an engine using something like ogre (or irrlicht/open scene graph/etc) has learned far more about software engineering than a student who has made a more polished looking game in unity using some asset store plugins and built in features. As a programmer I know which I'd pick at a job interview.

I think that's "game developer candidate's dilemma" I also considered a lot whether I should use Ogre for my graduation project or another ready-for-service complete game engine such as Unity, UDK or Havok (that one I've thought of hard) but using Ogre has paid me back within a couple weeks by getting me to learn the details and tips I'd better be aware of if I'll be a game dev after grad which is just what I like. If nothing else, it got me more patient and code-focused rather than product-focused. I worked with Unity at work and interns and let alone a year, I'd create my grad project with it in 3 months with fancy shaders but it really gets you lazy once you get used to it and miss the point, from a coder's point of view.

I now just work hard and hope that I'll be the one someone-like-you will pick at in the future interview(s) !