Argh!

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Klaim
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Re: Argh!

Post by Klaim »

Well said Kojack!

Damn I didn't finish that article about not using unity for my current big project. I can't invoke the C++ reason though as I'm confortable working with C# (ok it's not totally true, I still prefer C++) and I think I'll use unity for some small projects I've been thinking about, but really people asking to use unity should know better.

By the way, I think the only territory that still have a majority of iPhone is Japan.
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Kojack
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Re: Argh!

Post by Kojack »

I don't want to sound ungrateful to industry people who offer their time to provide good feedback to students. There's a lot of great stuff they do say about gameplay aspects. But they seem to forget that this is education.
The way I like it:
- Student learns c++.
- Student learns opengl or directx, fmod, direct input, etc to build simple engine from scratch and understand the underlying mechanics.
- Student learns ogre or similar middleware (irrlicht, etc) and does projects with it.
- Student graduates and decides to make a game with unity. Learning time is very short, and they have a good low level understanding so they can use Unity optimally (because they know what Unity is probably doing under the hood). Can easily join a non unity team (gamebryo, cryengine, udk, etc).

The way the industry (at least the ones I run into) seem to think:
- Student learns Unity.
- Student makes a Unity game.
- Student graduates and decides to make a game with unity. No learning time, so slightly faster beginning of the project, but lacking in the technical knowledge that may be needed for optimisation towards the end and screwed if they join a non unity company.

For example, one of my teams this year went for a heavily component system based engine. They made a separatable ragdoll system (for skeletons that follow ogre animations, but break apart when hit). They had interchangable parts on characters. They made procedurally generated levels that were fed into recast for all path finding and movement. They wrote tools for the designers to view weapons and change stats and stuff. Massive amount of work for 24 weeks. But they pulled it off and have an awesome understanding of game engines. They could pick up another engine with ease, or get jobs in serious coding fields. Their artists never said a word of complaint, it took maybe a day to get used to ogre exporting (reset transforms before export, watch the origin location, 4 bones per vertex max) and we even ended up with baked ambient occlusion maps on the levels. They could have made a unity game in a fraction of the time, but I seriously believe they wouldn't have learned as much.

Just to make it clear, I think unity is a great way for people to quickly make games, especially on mobile. Especially since it's got expensive middleware like Umbra built in. It's also great for game design students to learn scripting and experiment with different game mechanics without needing a programming support team. I just don't think it's suitable for programming students who should be learning techniques at a lower level. That's where engines like ogre shine.

Hmm, the ogre cafepress store is gone. I need an ogre tshirt to wear to these project presentations. :)
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Re: Argh!

Post by Jabberwocky »

If I were teaching, I'd prefer to have 2 separate classes - one for students who choose Ogre, and another for students who choose Unity. I would try to direct more technically-minded students seeking deeper understanding of game engine tech to Ogre. I would try to direct students with stronger interest in game design (this includes programmers) to Unity. The Ogre class would focus more on assembling a functional game engine out of middleware. The Unity class would focus more on Unity's high level sandbox scripting to create a game.

The Unity students would very likely come out with a more fleshed-out game, and the Ogre students a more fundamental education on how things work inside the black box presented by many game engines such as Unity.

It may not always be feasible to support 2 totally separate classes, depending on your student population. But I think it would be easier to teach that way, and create less distracting "Ogre vs. Unity" productivity arguments.
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Re: Argh!

Post by Kojack »

We kind of have that. Designers are taught programming with unity script and unity. Programmers are taught c++ and engine stuff. The major they choose affects how much and what kind of programming they do. If they find they don't like the low level style in the first trimesters they can change majors. In our new course (currently being rolled out) everyone learns unity at the very begining, then designers stay with it and programmers go off to the lower level stuff.
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Re: Argh!

Post by Jabberwocky »

That seems like a good approach.
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madmarx
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Re: Argh!

Post by madmarx »

The way I do it now is different.

Since most of students have problem with C syntax, and I want to teach still interesting things :
1/ C++, C basis teaching.
2/ We tell them to do their project with Unity.
3/ Design patterns etc.. in C#
4/ Lesson : how to publish your game ... without Unity. <== here reimplementation of an engine, which has the same inputs/outputs as Unity.
5/ Lesson : how to create an editor like Unity.
Tutorials + Ogre searchable API + more for Ogre1.7 : http://sourceforge.net/projects/so3dtools/
Corresponding thread : http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic. ... 93&start=0
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Kojack
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Re: Argh!

Post by Kojack »

We have an editor subject too. It teaches c# and Mogre (and other stuff like QT). Unfortunately Mogre is kind of dead (still only ogre 1.7), I'll need to find an alternative.
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EricB
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Re: Argh!

Post by EricB »

My Argh for the month:
Women...


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Need I say more?
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Kojack
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Re: Argh!

Post by Kojack »

Yeah, I have a little bit of extreme head desk going on for the same reason.
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Re: Argh!

Post by dbtx »

My only complaint about Unity:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity
It's used for everything.

"Hey, I want to instill deep positive feelings"
"Oh, well you can always name your foo something like Unity Foo, that should do it"

Now, back to read the whole thread...
ed: Thanks for the article c6burns, reminds me of "Never get sucked in by the comments, only debug actual code."
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Re: Argh!

Post by hydexon »

I heard your problems and i have it also.
Like Kojack, but slightly different.

I'm from the El Salvador, and my final project are creating a simple videogame, everyone of my class used Unity, only me was using OGRE3D/C++, the other students projects looks quite bad in my opinion, my project was quite impressive since i have unlimited access to everything in OGRE, i'm have to say, i was lucky to find OGRE3D.
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Re: Argh!

Post by simedj »

Herb wrote: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...
Yes, this is what using a complete engine framework is like.
Looking to find experienced Ogre & shader developers/artists. PM me with a contact email address if interested.
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Kojack
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Re: Argh!

Post by Kojack »

Here's an Argh! I'm experiencing at the moment.
The General Forum board has been sitting on 66664 posts for the last 4 days. Come on, just two more posts! Seeing that number sit there is driving me crazy.

I don't have ocd about numbers. But seeing it sit there so close to 66666 for 4 days is getting to me. :)
Does everyone have a 5 digit version of Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia?
:)
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Kojack
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Re: Argh!

Post by Kojack »

thanks jc denton and c6burns. :)
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Kojack
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Re: Argh!

Post by Kojack »

Another Argh! that's been annoying me for a while: Google Earth.
I love Google Earth. I can spend many hours just wandering around looking at things. I even upgraded from a Space Navigator to a Space Pilot Pro primarily for Google Earth (and other uses, but GE is great with it).

But it also pisses me off. In particular, the closed/limited nature of it.
For example, When exiting street view, the camera is left looking at an angle. I mostly use GE is a pure downwards view, I disable the pitch axis on my Space Pilot Pro unless needed. But exiting street view breaks that. I need to press the tilt reset key each time because it doesn't restore the previous view (position, zoom and tilt are all changed).
When in street view, the Space Pilot Pro has no control. Everything switches to mouse/keyboard only.
The memory cache is limited to 1GB and disk cache limited to 2GB. I've got 32GB of ram and terabytes of hard drive, why such a small limit?
There's many other irritations in the program (ui problems, lack of extensibility, etc).
These flaws could be easily fixed if the program was open source.

Of course a better alternative would be to make a whole new Google Earth client. The Gaia project was an open source Google Earth client. But Google cease and desisted them. Apparently Google is scared that if any client other than theirs can view the map data, the providers of the maps will cancel the whole thing.

There's always NASA World Wind, but it doesn't have anywhere near the resolution of Google's data. Kind of sad that NASA can't scan the earth in enough res to match these commercial map providers.

Things are much better than in the past, I still remember when the Keyhole viewer (before Google bought them out) required an account and only gave a short trial period for free. But the current situation is like having Microsoft send cease and desist against any browser other than IE, if they try to view www.microsoft.com

One thing I'd love to do with Google Earth is add a mode that shows detail levels for different regions. There's no way to know where high res maps are without actually zooming in to look. I want a colour coded view so I can quickly find high detail regions.
There are tools that do rip the data from google earth / maps, but they are of questionable legality and google will ip block anyone that downloads maps in a suspicious pattern.
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EricB
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Re: Argh!

Post by EricB »

At least you're not writing a user manual...

My game is mostly buttons and sliders... I'm halfway done and I've written 46 pages of raw text about buttons and sliders...
Even the Ogre3d stuff is manipulated by, you guessed it, buttons and sliders... :(

Next ticket I have is an audio/visual tutorial system. And until it's finished and working I'm not going to bother my voice actress. Which means until then, I have to talk about... buttons and sliders... :( :( :(


kill me
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TheSHEEEP
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Re: Argh!

Post by TheSHEEEP »

*sneaks up on bronzebeard* .... BUTTONS AND SLIDERS !!!!
My site! - Have a look :)
Also on Twitter - extra fluffy
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EricB
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Re: Argh!

Post by EricB »

Ahhhhhh!

http://www.gearcity.info/media/09.jpg

Buttons and sliders :cry:
(That's one of the more tame windows)
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Kojack
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Re: Argh!

Post by Kojack »

I'd love to hook a couple of these to my pc for controlling sliders:
[youtube]tHHpHU-JgTg[/youtube]
The Behringer BCF2000 motorised fader.
Imagine a photoshop plugin that set the first 6 faders to the current foreground and background colours. You can change the colours using the faders, but the faders are also changed by the colours. A haptic feedback interface control.
Or in a game you could have various debugging features on faders like game time speedup/slowdown, gravity, player mass, etc. Any good setting could be saved and later restored physically onto the sliders.
(I really need to ask at work if we can get a discount on them. $389au isn't too bad, but more than I want to spend on something I won't use that often)
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Kojack
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Re: Argh!

Post by Kojack »

Two more arghs.

First
The number of people on youtube who believe the moon landing is a hoax. It's especially annoying when they go over the same damn lighting/physics issues that have been explained so damn many times. I guess as a graphics programmer I'm sensitive to people not understanding lighting and optics. I just saw one person say that believing the moon landing did happen is the same as believing the world is flat. :shock:

Second
Chip flavour selection in australia sucks. Consider corn chips. Doritos in America have: cool ranch, chile limon, fiery habanero, nacho picoso, flamas, enchilada supreme, ranch dipped hot wings, spicy chipotle, cool ranch & crunchy taco, nacho cheese & crunchy taco, nacho cheese, salsa verde, spicy nacho, spicy sweet chili, taco, tapatio, plain. That's 17 flavours. Australian Doritos have the following: plain, nacho cheese and tasty cheese. 3 flavours. Well, we did have doritos burn for a while, but they are gone now. I could get CC's brand instead. They have plain, nacho cheese and tasty cheese... damn it.
Potato chips fair a bit better here, but still nowhere near as many kinds as America.
I can get some imported via places like USAFoods, but they charge a heap. Almost $9 (not counting shipping) for a bag of doritos? Ouch.

I have a third rant, but I'll save it for later. I've got coding to do.
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Re: Argh!

Post by Zonder »

Kojack wrote:
Second
Chip flavour selection in australia sucks. Consider corn chips. Doritos in America have: cool ranch, chile limon, fiery habanero, nacho picoso, flamas, enchilada supreme, ranch dipped hot wings, spicy chipotle, cool ranch & crunchy taco, nacho cheese & crunchy taco, nacho cheese, salsa verde, spicy nacho, spicy sweet chili, taco, tapatio, plain. That's 17 flavours. Australian Doritos have the following: plain, nacho cheese and tasty cheese. 3 flavours. Well, we did have doritos burn for a while, but they are gone now. I could get CC's brand instead. They have plain, nacho cheese and tasty cheese... damn it.
Potato chips fair a bit better here, but still nowhere near as many kinds as America.
I can get some imported via places like USAFoods, but they charge a heap. Almost $9 (not counting shipping) for a bag of doritos? Ouch.
That is crap can't understand why you not got a decent selection over there UK has loads can't name em but it's more than 3.
There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't...
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Re: Argh!

Post by Daixiwen »

Kojack wrote:Second
Chip flavour selection in australia sucks.
That's easy to solve. Eat more fresh vegetables instead :P
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Kojack
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Re: Argh!

Post by Kojack »

I'm being Argh!'d by the ads on tv for the show Star-Crossed.
Is it possible to put less effort into making aliens than just drawing some marks on their face with a black pen?
Alien Nation (both original movie and tv series) was much better (and wasn't some alien themed teen romance garbage).

Crap:
[youtube]xupbSWtzb4g[/youtube]

Cool:
[youtube]-1jURDHRINY[/youtube]
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Re: Argh!

Post by c6burns »

I feel like sci-fi targetted to teens is a mistake, but I'm sure the network has focus groups which disagree. Or some suit was pitching it as "Twilight-but-with-aliens".

I don't know of a truly awesome sci-fi shows that began airing after BSG remake. Ronald D Moore is writing/producing Helix right now, but it hasn't quite pulled me in after 6 episodes.

EDIT: Oh I just remembered falling skies. It was OK. Quite good at the start, but I felt it got worse later on. Maybe S4 this summer and turn that trend around :lol:
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Re: Argh!

Post by Kojack »

Falling Skies wasn't bad. Although I missed most of the start of it, I came in half way through.
Defiance seemed interesting, but I only saw two episodes (before forgetting when it was on and missing episodes).

I'd like to see a new show like Dark Skies or UFO. A Men In Black kind of thing but serious instead of comedy. XCOM the tv series? That would be cool.
[youtube]uGvjNOtlI3U[/youtube]

Last night I read that there's a spinoff series from Supernatural on the way. Set in Chicago, with waring factions of monsters. Could be worth a watch, I like Supernatural. I really need to get back to the anime version, I've got the bluray but have only watched the first couple of episodes.