Murdoc

I've used Maya and Max equally in the industry. I prefer Max for my job, but animators and character artists seem to enjoy Maya more.

I didn't take a screen shot, but an update on Bioware's career page saying they were hiring for the new BioWare Hawaii was especially displeasing to me this morning. It's gone now and yeah, it sounded silly in retrospect, but damn it, don't do that when someone is checking out your page for a job.

Crazy that Valve went with the UE3 engine, even they didn't want to bother with that UE4 subscription. hehehe.

I take back my initial statement, since I was unaware of what this is that everyone seems to know. But going back to it off and on today, I really enjoy whatever is going on; at some point I just understood it would out thinking about it and was jamming away at it.

Funny, I just stopped watching GB's quick look of Betrayer and my immediate reaction was hating a lot of it and having this kind of gross feeling. So rolled into listening to the episode where it was discussed and Sean basically puts those feelings into words for a legitimate critique.

Yeah I don't listen to the podcast anymore. Also, I kind of get the game now, it's neat.

I don't get what's going on, I'm moving arrows randomly and getting a higher score... I think this game plays itself.

It was a great engine, but was already showing it's age for Conviction, so I'm surprised that after they moved the core team to Toronto and hired new people they wouldn't have just switched over to Ubi's engine to allow a little more variety in their level set ups; but I guess it would take too much time to work in all the mechanics again. I have to imagine they would be making that hard switch for the new gen, but will be really pleased to see if they don't. UE2.5 fundamental architecture on an Xbox One game in 2015-2016 would be hilarious. Anyway, the tech guys at Ubisoft are great, I've never seen a company more dedicated at developing tools and features for their engine than I have anywhere else; but i guess with their numbers they can afford to do it, but it also showed a commitment to the development team, the project, and thinking a head for the future. Anyway, back on point, I will be excited to see what people make with early UE4, it should be interesting, I may be fundamentally against their pricing structure, but the engine can at least render pretty things so hope people experiment with that a bit.

Zygna owns one of the most advanced animation systems used in games, Facebook owns the most important step in VR in a decade.... the world is weird now.

I don't know about the new one, but Conviction was. But it was modified in a way that it acted a lot like Unreal 3, then because the original Conviction was mainly in the day time it had some really amazing tools for shadows and fake GI (which is why enlighten is taking care of now) along with really solid physics tools for props and such, coupled with an impressive system for rendering specular/reflection for objects... all of it was really cool for it's time and I haven't seen a lot of engines do what that engine was made to do. So it was 2.5 but seriously modified.

I don't work the books, but I'd be surprised if any of the games I worked on paid a royalty after shelling out 500k for an engine. But again, I'm not the money person, just an artist. But it would even be more incentive for them to cut Epic out, which is what everyone is doing now, so sure, why not. edit: Ah, so apparently the contracts are on a per company basis, so it could be different for everyone. On several forum posts on the epic board I've seen the number 400-750k thrown around for a no royalty license; which could be completely hearsay. I said 500k because that was the number we through around at Propaganda 8-9 years ago when we bought two of them and I know there were no royalties involved in that specific deal. At Ubisoft, I don't know the numbers as it was Unreal 2.5. Anyway, I think there is a no royalty free option, but the big companies need to be willing to pay for it and considering they all want the 100 million dollar sales, I'd imagine they would take the hit on a flat fee.

5% onto of the 25-30% Steam takes is becoming unreasonable, especially when Unreal has very little to offer over other options that don't take that extra percentage. I seriously don't get it, unless they have dropped some amazing updates over the last 4 months, it's still an unproven engine. UE3 was basically in the same state when they released it and it was only until after Gears shipped that it could be made for a game. Dave Lang made some really excellent comments about UE3 on the recent Bombcast and it was pretty much spot on with both my experience of Ue3 and Ue4. Big devs can afford 500k to buy a license (which is roughly what Unreal has cost in the past), but I can guarantee they won't accept any percentage off the top. It's why the bigger devs have started to develop their own internal engines as it doesn't make sense to drop that much money every time you make a game. As a level architect I found the tools in UE4 subpar, the streaming and data management exactly the same as UE3 (which works, but after 8 years, kind of expected better) and several other features I could rifle off after trying to make a level that weren't even acknowledged. I have to imagine small to mid sized devs would want every penny they can get from their sales with the lowest overhead possible. I'm looking to go independent next year and doing the math on any royalty deal just for an engine seems unacceptable as the margins are so narrow that it makes a difference if I can sustain a business or not. But that's just my situation and I'm surprised that I'm not seeing more people speak up on how awful that UE4 pricing is, so maybe it's not so bad. It's so easy to get caught up on their visual demos, because that's what they do best, but looking the documentation and inner workings of it, it just isn't there for a lot of the types of games I'd be making. Just after being completely unimpressed with the engine, I have no idea why anyone would pay so much for it.

Hunt and skin three yeddis for a new wallet.

Amazing.

Good news, Kismet's totally different now! It's blueprint! (which is actually pretty rad to be fair) When I was testing it in October and we were supposedly supposed to start production in January my recommendation was to continue to use Unreal 3, as crazy as that would have been. We would have needed so much programming support to get the features it didn't yet have. The same thing happened with Unreal 3 though, and the saying goes "Don't ship a game on Unreal until Epic has shipped their own game" But I wasn't even sure Epic was going to make games anymore, but apparently they are still working on Fortnight and something else.

Weird... the guy that was just eating us alive quite when I was down to my last 2 stars. There is no climbing out of this hole, but it's worth a shot to keep playing.

I was testing this back in October and was really dissapointing. Half the features available in Unreal 3 weren't implemented and from the looks of it (at least pertaining to my job) they planned to just copy and paste it from Unreal 3, which was not the upgrade I was looking for. Other then rendering fidelity, I have no idea what UE4 would offer over Unity right now.

Probably will be posted on GDC Vault, only $500/yr for access!

Maybe I'm more aware of it this year more than most, or there is a certain trend going on, but I'm finding a lot of these talks more PR for the speakers project than in depth discussions. I've noticed that with the recent articles on gamasutra as well, it's more to create awareness for what you're working on then getting to the meat of the subject. Is anyone else noticing this as well?

I'm up for another since I was just casually playing the last two, it didn't seem like such an exhausting experience this time around. I'm just curious how the super powers began. I still don't know how a real spectators mode would exist for Neptunes Pride, but this 65 player game is precisely where I'd want it. In some point in history Neptunes Pride 3 is made and makes a bazillion dollars, I'd like to see Iron Helm just hire a news team to cover matches and release an edited version of the larger stuff after it's completed.

I can't afford GDC, but I'm in the city and can at least buy a couple drinks. Dear Mom might be a tough one for GDC since it's the defunk game developer bar in the city. But I'll be up for anything.

Small Game: Yeah it was neat, I'm not sure if I'd ever play that tiny of a game again though. With just three other people it was really easy to track who was trading tech. So at one point I was friends with someone and they were saying they were against this guy, the next, they both had the same technology levels, so I could never really trust them. There was a tipping point where three of us were going to come down on Sacroulix (SGP) but at the last second I decided to double, double cross and continue my blood feud with Dr. Zaius. I thought it was funnier, but it just made the game play out by the numbers as we were both over powered by Sacroulix. An interesting suggestion to the dark galaxy mechanic, would be to black out a players stats, how many stars they have, maybe even tech levels, it would have made the smaller game more interesting I think. Also, congrats SGP, I hope you name the baby Neptune. 65 player game: I was only half paying attention and didn't really do a lot of politicking so was never in a position of power. The Thumbs Cabal at least set out to do a couple things and we took out a guy to more or less unify our little cluster. Meanwhile in other parts of the galaxy the real game was going on and eventually just washed over a couple of us. For the last few cycles I've just been diverting all funds to "youmeyou" as he has a greater chance of surviving a bit longer. But the behemoth is producing 500 ships an hour, at most, I was making 25. It's the very example the Idle Thumbs talks about with the fog of war. In our little corner of space we were doing alright, we were taking out the little guys and working together which was a lot of fun... then the fog of war lifts (figuratively, we could have been more aware what others were up to) and other people were a million years a head of us. Really interesting, but I noticed most of the behemoths in that game were the ones that started on the outer edges, which may have given them a slight advantage, then combine that with the dummy accounts, etc..

Weird, it wasn't the worst part of the game for me, but I loved all that stuff. Maybe I'm too big of an SP fan, but the fact they nailed the asthetics and feel of an episode, just being immersed into the SP world and exploring it was a highlight for me. The campaign stuff certainly moves the game along past the mechanics; which were good, but are wearing thin so far.

So Drew has a cool prototype going already and I'm just getting back into making sprites, so a bit of relearning going on. Right now just doodling at lunch.

I will be playing this as soon as I get home. Looks really rad.