General feedback & other software.

Wow, that's restrictive. I was thinking along the lines of the mysterious cost, but that's an added wrinkle. My eroge game project certainly wouldn't be welcome there.

 

@GameDevGuy I totally agree man, Unity definitely needs some official tutorials and some improved documentation compared to UE4, also I think Unity should move its roadmap to Trello like Epic.

 

Does anyone else here think Stingray is going to have a hard time competing with Unity & Unreal at $30 month? Yes obviously its a much better deal than $75 but Unity still has a free version almost fully featured and lots of free content on the marketplace to get anyone with any level of experience started right away.

 

I am very big on documentation. I actually find Unity's documentation fine. I asked my two programmers and they feel the same way. Of course, we did come from Torque so for us, Unity's docs are step up.

Rarely do I not find the answer to something somewhere and while I don't always get replies to questions from Unity, there are always members of the community willing to help. One reason I would like to see things like terrain, water, etc. covered by Unity is that the documentation from some very popular assets is terrible. I hate to look for an answer only to find, "coming soon" or "more about that later". Just because there is a big document on the physics of tossing balls in the air, doesn't mean the documentation has anything useful for those of us trying to implement the asset.

I think that is my number one reason for wanting more from Unity so I can rely less on asset developers, at least for the basics. I spend so much time waiting for replies to questions...and sometimes the developers disappear for months. Life happens, and the money they get probably isn't worth any serious substantial support. I get that..and don't knock them for it. Documentation and support are tough...very tough. Unity seems to be doing a good job on docs, at least for our needs...so far.

 

You get Maya LT with it. I already pay for that. So yeah, my guess is they will be able to compete if people want to learn Lua.

 

@S.0.L.0. - I love Trello. I use it for my own projects and I'm very happy to see it used for software like Unreal and Spine. Unity going with Trello would also make me happy.

I think the available Unity docs and tutorials are solid. I say this as a programmer and as a doc writer. Could they be improved, by shoring up the existing content and adding more? Absolutely. That's the case with all software. I've often repeated this phrase on other sites and it applies to Unity as well.

"Documentation: Everyone wants it. No one wants to write it. It will never be finished."

 

@Teila - "Of course, we did come from Torque so for us, Unity's docs are step up. "

Cool, so you have some background knowledge on what I'm talking about. I'm not sure if you switched engines before or after my big documentation effort for Torque, but you probably remember the sheer number of threads/blogs complaining about Torque docs. It was relentless. The scary part is that it can happen to any engine, be it Unity, UE4, CE, and so on. In the early TGE days, many people thought the docs were great. As the community grew and the engine evolved, the docs were no longer sufficient. The less time spent on documentation, the more the overall product will suffer. It will become an endless catch up game, which is not fun for anyone.

 

I don't have a problem with the Unity docs for the most part. I'm clearly missing something crucial in trying to get GI working, so something a little more in depth in that area would be nice. But for the most part, the docs provide what I need. In deciding whether to switch to Cryengine or Unreal, I took a look at the Cryengine docs. I think I could read the whole thing 10 times and still not have a clue how to do anything. They have the most horrible documentation ever. And that's ignoring all the spelling and grammar errors that litter parts of it. I also didn't know about Cryengine's licensing issues until this thread. So I guess I'll delete that and download Unreal. Whether I stick with Unreal or Unity depends on how Unreal handles my lighting issues and whether I get them solved in Unity before I get my scene ported over to Unreal.

 

@HemiMG what kind of lighting issues are you having?

 

Maya LT is $30/month also which is actually pretty good considering they are bundling Stingray with it, however its mainly going to be artists paying for Maya LT so whether its the bundle or engine there is still a $30 monthly subscription entry barrier.

 

I just want to point out another important thing about game engine sdk's in addition to community, documentation, tutorials and marketplace is source control. Unity is still the winner in this area aswell with support for text serialization and git repos.

Unreal uses Perforce which has some free hosting solutions coming soon so it will soon be on par with Unity in terms of ease of collaboration, though the UE4 community and marketplace still have quite a ways to go before they catch up with Unity.

 

I've already posted about them in the correct forum and recapped them in another thread in this one, so I don't really want to derail the thread further since it's way more than just one issue. I clearly have no clue how any aspect of Enlighten is supposed to work and no documentation or video has been able to help. I'm hoping I will find Unreal easier to work with because this project has to start moving forward again.

 

stingray has a very important feature (integration with other apps) I can not stress enough how important it is for me

I love unity but I'll go with stingray if I find it good as I expect

but I won't stop using unity cause unity will remain the best for mobile no doubt

in case of mobile game development I'll use unity

30$ per month is it high? it depends

unreal is absolutely free , but for those who can't make money , but for those who can , unity is much cheaper

the same applies to stingray if you know you can make money , stingray is certainly the cheapest engine on the market

by the way for those who are supposed to make money from other fields rather than game such as arch vis , animation etc stingray + maya LT for only 30$ is like a joke

I wanted to buy redshift render engine 500$ just for rendering animation

and I thought the price worth it , it speeds up my workflow at least 2 time faster

what can I say about stingray? it speeds up my work 100 times and it is very cheap

lua is the easiest programming language

 

Whilst the roadmap is great Andy, it solidifies the end users stance on the product. It did ultimately end any ties for me, some quite important stuff is on the backburner or we won't see for another couple of years. Which UE already has said tools and features already, not really much point in waiting.

I understand the upper tier 3D market is quite a difficult market to tap, plus you're busy with stability etc. But there's reasons why small teams with big dreams, mid sized indies and AAA avoid Unity. It's simply this, time and money..

If you've ever worked in AAA, they are generally tighter than mid sized or small teams in regards to money. Trying to get a tool approved is generally a 40 page process, which is sent up and down management. It's like pulling teeth and you bet your bottom dollar you have to have a water tight justification document.

If I was doing a pro's / cons sheet for upper management, I'd say sure with Unity you get C# and it's easier to use but a lot of tools and features are lacking. First thing they'll say to me is, well how much in man power would it cost to get Unity in a competitive state? I do a document saying it'll take X many engineers, X many hours plus the cost of licenses.. So in a team of 100, (random numbers here, but definitely the procedure).. $150K in licenses, I assign 20 engineers for six months to work on the engine ($500K), plus chances are we'd need access to the source + whatever that costs? Let's round that up to a cool million eh including the cost of staff training.!

I could just get a royalty free deal and UDN access for $250K.. They wouldn't go for Unity and I wouldn't be able to justify without lying. Plus the ample amount of official tutorials and demo scenes makes training the team simpler and more cost efficient, UE4 one point!..

Ok, small to mid sized indies.. Whilst we generally have engine / rendering developers to assist (we have two here) we can't afford to put the man hours and effort in, generally we have more than enough money to buy the tools and maybe we can afford the man hours to improve a few things. But generally were reliant on the product developer, we can't afford source and generally we can't afford the man power to make it worth our while anyway. So what Unity does in that scenario seriously impacts us and it's concerning that our competition can make better looking products in a smaller amount of time. It's all about marketing right? Shiny = get's customers through the doors (I'm not talking graphics only here either, advanced IK animation systems, material editors, advanced good looking particles, lighting etc). UE4 one point.!

Then we have artists / Arch viz, they're going to go for what makes there portfolio look the best again with the least amount of effort. The more they have, the more chance they'll be hired... Artist A isn't going to spend all his time coding shaders, it's rare they know how, although most are fine with material editors. Arch viz is a lucrative market, they will pay! UE4 one point.!

Now we have hobbyists, great to have. Generally they'll just have fun with whatever, they'll release tutorials and tidbits great for everyone. But they're generally not going to pay your wages.. Unity and UE one point.!

Finally we have one man bands or very small teams, making a game by yourself is a hard task. Graphics aren't as important, AAA grade tools are not needed as mobile and small 3D / 2D games don't need them. Some will earn over $100K and be very succesful, so it's a good revenue source. But generally one man bands won't have the sort of money small to AAA dev's have.. Unity one point.!

TLDR;

You're currently cutting a massive portion of paying customers out with the way things are, the roadmap didn't make it better. End of the day, we have credible choices now and it's not indie's in the long run who will suffer.

 

I'm going to "other software" for a suggestion. Filter Forge is a very nice art tool. It has a large range of filters that procedurally create textures (some include diffuse, bump, specular and normal maps). Many of those filters are created by the community. Anyone creating popular filters gets Filter Forge for free (I assume this can also be applied to upgrades (they are currently in beta for version 5).

Following on from GameDevGuy's post. Perhaps users could get credit towards Unity Pro by contributing to the documentation, tutorials, or anything else that forms part of the available knowledge base (of course content would have to be approved). Filter Forge are also applying it to bugs found in their beta. Perhaps downloads of free assets in the Asset Store could count to encourage them. Another simple one is 100% of an Asset Store purchase goes to the creator (rather than the normal 70%) if that is towards purchasing Unity Pro (or add-ons of course).

Unity, the community, and the contributors all benefit.

 

"how is stingray going to compete with others"

my bet is : hardly and slowly..

basicaly,
- all maya users may put their hands on it. (nor meaning adopt it)
- arch viz guys will certainly get involved in it as a new handy tool, provided that they find a good documentation and support
- small to medium teams may try it, not adopt it (yet)
- stingray has no enough history and it will take 1 or 2 years for them to catch significant number of teams on it.
- AD may occasionally work closely with an established studio/editor on a project that will be used more like a marketing showcase.

it is not going to be a "flash success" and users will judge over time...
what will make stingray successful or not is documentation, support, quality of Tools/workflow, upgrades and... acquired reputation. plus the quality of users community.
if they want stingray to really succeed , they will have to show a constant effort during 2 or 3 long years.... unlike Gmax.

my guess is they won't have a second chance to succeed..

 

Have to admit...I would like to see the terrain tools.....not that we would switch now, but who knows in the future.

 

CryEngine is a massive shame, it had all the potential in the world to be the best. Whilst the documentation was lacking and the art pipeline is still very weak plus generally making games is harder than it should be. It wasn't really the engine that was the issue (hell I've worked with Torque, so anything up from there right?)

Before they did their steam rollout (for whatever reason) indies worked on games, submitted it to CryTek and hoped for the best.

There were numerous occasions in which I saw Indies getting ignored for an "indie" license. Crytek weren't interested in supporting indies, neither would they listen to feedback or help with support. Also some of the staff handled things very un-professionally.

http://www.cryengine.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=355&p=1075219
http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/105142-make-crytek-give-me-my-damn-indie-license/

I'm not completely sure why they released it to the general indie populous, I suppose it was a bit of marketing at one point until it ultimately turned against them. Even now as others stated, the license is a bit squiffy and nothing really has changed in regards to the approach.

So in the end, it never really took off.

 

And another nail to the coffin!

Anyway, the one thing I miss after using UDK (this was way before free UE4 announcement) for a month was built-in water buoyancy. Now I know that Unity has such system for 2d (water effector or something called like that), but UDK's thing was for 3D. I'd gladly welcome built-in 3D buoyancy for Unity so making games where swimming/water vehicles has important part would be easy and we won't have to go to Asset store to buy some system that may or may not work properly.

 

oh yes very true, how did they spoil their awesome quality in that lame way....shame on them altough i love it.
they have been completely overwhelmed by the indie dev requests....

but search for cryengine cookbooks and you'll find that some staff members actually make some money with that...
it puts "lack of good documentation" in a curious perspective....they do have good tutorials, skilled staff to do them, be sure of that... it makes me angry bird

 

These are my recommendations:

• Show post-processing effects in the Scene View. Having to switch to the Game View is a major annoyance.
• Why are lights limited to a maximum intensity of 8? 8 what? Physically based units are a must if you're aiming for realism.
• Linear falloff looks awful and completely unrealistic when using linear space rendering. Introduce the option to use inverse square falloff.
• IES Profiles support would be nice.
  
• Get rid of Blinn-Phong as the specular model of the standard shader and replace it with GGX. It's the standard in pretty much every engine and tool right now.

 

At least Unity and Epic try with their customers, I saw the Unity director of QA helping out in a thread. You can't buy that sort of customer relationship and is a major positive in my book. Sure I think Unity is long in the tooth and it's a problem in such a difficult economic market.. But I like Unity as an engine, it's pretty cool!

I wouldn't be here or ever used it if I didn't think so .. One of the happiest moments I remember was getting a small dude running around chopping in my small hack and slash. Little victories, but well worth it .

@OCASM

I'm pretty sure that's what the Alloy guys said and that's pretty much what I do whenever I start a new project. I dumped all the standard lighting setups (even in Unity 4).

 

ah ah... i remind of me trying to put my player in cryengine, tearing my hair off...with those xml files trying to import facial anims with "zero out issues" during days....

then i remember it took me 2 minutes to put my player in a unity basicTemplate and have it running around....
at this moment i kinda married unity

and yes having unity devs and staff always close to community is priceless..

 

I'm studying game design. As part of that we have to learn coding & 3d art. Some in the class have never coded but have done some 3d art & vice versa. Not many have done both. I suspect that in a year or 2 some schools may start using stingray due to the easy integration of the art into the game engine as that will remove a layer of complexity that new students have to cope with. Currently a lot of the schools use maya or blender with unity, but if schools can just get one cheap license for students that get them 2 tools with native/built in integration then I suspect that they will only be waiting for initial release to be stabilised & teachers to redo class documentation before they jump ship.

Unity has a great community, & is fairly easy to use, but a lot of new users are probably coming from students who used it in class & are continuing to use it after they leave. If students stop using it now then in a few years there may be a sudden drop in the number of indie users as those students fail to roll through & continue using Unity.


So, I'd also include an easy to use, built in, art tool - buy blender or do a deal with someone to make them the primary art tool whilst still allowing other tools to be used (just not as easily).

 

i second that, being 3d instructor in that kind of school, yes, being already with AD products is a weight in the balance when it comes to choose an engine.
but atm, we discuss about unity and it doesn't really make a difference, students will have to learn how to export assets properly in a clean and optimized way and i'm not sure that having stingray directly at the end of the pipeline will help them to "touch" the difficulty to produce good assets and give them good practices.

 

but I think autodesk is going to be very successful with stingray for some reasons

first they practically sell maya LT with stingray
what does this mean for animators they are already interested in maya LT because of its low price but lack of any rendering engine prevent them from trying maya LT
now they can render their job with maya LT by stingray and these animator who even never touched a game engine nor interested in game field become active stingray users

3ds max users (arch guys mainly) dreamed to have something like this , they became stingray users as well

the most important thing is nowadays realtime graphic is enough for production

in the past we where limited by hardware by 128 or 256 mg vram you couldn't load much texture , but now you can get a graphic card with 4 gig vram for cheap the graphic card itself share 20 gig of main memory practically 24 gig vs 256 mg in some few years before

isn't enough? take a titan z card , 12 gig of vram + 49 gig share = 51 gig vram

that should be enough for anything

in the past realtime graphic where like cartoon , these cartoony graphic is not acceptable for artist who are looking for realism (specially architectures)

but nowadays look at aaa picture produced by game engines , you can't tell that image is produced by a software rendering or graphic card

now we have everything reflection , refraction , sss , GI and even raytracing is coming

so producing realtime rendering is a need , This need is well understood by autodesk.

 

I read that Maya LT users were going to get Stingray free, but Stingray users will not get Maya LT free. My guess from that would be that only existing Maya LT users will get it free, not new users. Has anyone heard anything to confirm or deny that?

 

Maya LT looks great but for AAA quality your still going to need the rest of the entertainment suite which costs $300 month. Hopefully the price drops for 2017 release since they are discontinuing Softimage though its possible they could just replace it with Stingray and keep the price close to what it is now.

 

"Powerful workflows with Stingray game engine"

http://www.autodesk.com/products/maya-lt/features/all/list-view

 

i will soon switch to maya LT, so ...i'm happy i will have stingray included

 

actually stingray users get maya LT for free
and it is not going to stop

 

Not necessarily
maya LT is enough
even it has sculpting tool like mudbox for creating maps
HIK with good performance like motion builder

 

Yes I noticed they added some sculpting from mudbox to Maya LT 2016 but its very limited, pretty sure it does not even have mirroring. and physx will require a plugin which might cost extra? Even though its included in Maya Full.

http://www.autodesk.com/products/maya/compare/compare-products

 

What suite? You get Beast / Scaleform etc. integrated with it.

 

do you need mudbox anymore?

• 
  Modeling
• Built-in sculpting tools NEW
  Brush-based sculpting tools are now available in Maya LT 2016, giving artists a way to do high level sculpting on their models without having to export to a different tool.
  
  
  • Save time by making small tweaks and adjustments with new sculpting tools directly in Maya LT.
  • Use the included base meshes as a starting point to save time when creating new models, or to start learning the new sculpting tools.

 

you are wrong practically the same as mudbux
mirror? are you kidding me?

in fact it is more practical than mudbox

 

This is a great thread...too bad people have to hijack it. If they hijack from Aurore, what else will the do!

 

entertainment creation suite ultimate

http://www.autodesk.com/suites/entertainment-creation-suite/included-software

 

softimage is dead
mudbox is dying
motionbuilder still good for performance reason only

maya is absolutely enough suite isn't needed

 

at 46 seconds he demonstrates that mirrioring with the sculpting tool is not working but he also says it may because he didn't learn how yet. From the Maya 2016 sculpting video you just shared it seems that it mirroring is supported though.

 

Hmmm, we do have official tutorials! http://unity3d.com/learn

 

Anyone else feel like it's a bit odd they would simply throw it into the Maya LT bundle at no additional cost? It isn't as if Maya LT isn't already successful on its own. It might just be the way I'm thinking about it, but it feels like they're not too confident if they're simply giving it away to all the Maya LT owners.

 

S.0.L.0.

that guy is maya hater I see them more and more but really confused why they hate maya
try it yourself

 

Well look at their competition, all of which have fully featured free versions.

 

LOL I am considering LT now but I just don't like the idea of having a watered down version of Maya, look at all those shiny extra features man.

 

no they are trying to populate maya , attracting max users to maya make a single app for everything they brought motion builder into maya some years ago and mudbox recently

 

Interesting comments and opinions; but one thing really stood out for me:

"But there's reasons why small teams with big dreams, mid sized indies and AAA avoid Unity. It's simply this, time and money.."

Do you have any statistical data that backs this point, as opposed to approximations?

 

The only thing you'd need out of that lot is (Maybe) Mudbox, Maya LT contains the HumanIK system and auto-rigging system with re-targeting and mocap support plus it also can sculpt.. Although I don't mind mudbox and it's only 10 bucks a month..

I'm not sure why you'd need Max when you have LT? I have an older version of Max BTW (2011) and I hardly use it anymore..

The oddest thing about Maya LT for me was, it pretty much has all the most advanced systems of all the other autodesk products for games. Then they go ahead and put a 100K poly limit on FBX export??? Silly, but there is a send to Unity / unreal and there is no limit on import.

If you have truly used Maya LT 2016, you'd realise the thing is VERY advanced. Unless you need V-ray style rendering, there's no reason not to use it .

 

Once mudbox is officially dead and fully integrated into Maya and MotionBuilder becomes a complete panel, then it will be enough.