Is the Unity Community too big?

I have to say that my lack of understanding of why people can't sort through the materials has been cleared up a bit recently. It's more of the whole signal to noise ratio again. Simply put, a lot of the learning material available on the web is just crap.

When I was focusing primarily on programming within Unity, I could filter a lot of the garbage fairly quickly because I studied programming in college and could recognize badly written and/or badly done programming tutorials. Now that I am trying to learn Blender and some basic 3D modeling, I run into the problem that I sometimes have to go through an entire hour of video before I realize, "Well, that was completely worthless." I do not have the filters built up yet to spot the tutorials that are only covering the tiny basics I know, or which are not covering techniques in a way understandable to my level of skill, or whatever other issues there are.

So, I understand the frustration of feeling like you cannot find the material you need because there's more noise than signal out there.

 

Six months is awful. But I do have to be the jerk and ask the question. Is programming and game development for you?Anyone who has become good at coding will tell you its not for everyone. You need a certain mind set. That is the same mind set many of the coding teachers you despise have.

I am working on a tutorial series like this. My wife watched the first episode yesterday and was able to follow it and asked for more (for reference she is an artist, and not a computer game artist, like one with actual paint and an easel). If she can follow it, it should be good in general for non programmers. But its going to take a while, doing programming in non programming terms is not the easiest tutorial series I've written.

 

I like this idea. Those of us who know how to code can just read the key from out of the script

 

I think there is a huge amount of truth to this that a lot of the more experienced guys tend to forget. I've definitely found this also venturing into new unknown areas, like sound editing, video, 3d, etc. You need to learn what to filter and what not to, and it's just very hard to do when you're a clueless noob.

 

I get that and agree completely. Information overload is valid. There is a lot to learn. Blender can be quite a beast. I have not used it since starting with Unity because I am working on 2D projects with pixel art but I used it for several years before getting into Unity. There is a steep learning curve (or at least there was for me) but once you get the keys down it is fairly easy to work with.

The thing with all of this... I guess I just wonder if maybe people are expecting things to be easier without taking into account there is just a lot to learn. I found Unity very strange when I first tried it out. It was just weird to me. I launched it and saw all of this GUI and thought "what in hell is all of this crap? I want to make a game not spend my time dragging stuff around". It just didn't make sense to me because in all of the APIs I have used none were ever like this. They were just code libraries. It was a heck of a learning curve and seemed to me like they had taken something that was fairly easy and made it more complicated. But I just kept working with it and throwing out the traditional workflows and devised my own which has me spending minimal time in the editor and more time coding.

I think learning these things just takes time because there is a lot to learn. Learning Unity is quite a project because there is so much to cover. Learning Blender just the application itself is quite a task just because there is so much functionality to cover. And that is just learning the interface then there is point modeling, box modeling and so forth learning the actual 3D modeling itself and finding which you prefer and which methods work best for these things and which work best for those things. I just think a person has to expect this will all take a good amount of time and effort.

So I wonder sometimes if people expect to come in and learn all of this stuff in 3 to 9 months and be making games like a pro? If so, is that realistic and why do they expect that? For some people it may be realistic but I don't think it should be expected as the norm.

You're right the amount of material available for reference on the Internet can be a bad thing especially when it is someone who barely knows the stuff themselves and they are making tutorials on it and not even understanding it fully themselves. Ironically, it is a great way to learn by trying to teach others so maybe that is part of the reason so many people are doing it.

 

Evan, you may have already tried this but have you looked at Udemy? My college son picked it up a year or so ago, signed up for a coding class, Java I think, for Unity. He went through the class, then signed up for a Java class at his college. He said the Udemy class taught him a lot. He did the same for C#, first Udemy, then the college class.

His coding skills were very weak before Udemy but it helped him a lot. His C# professor was so impressed, he thought my son was close to getting his B.S. degree and sent him a resume for a job plus an excellent letter of recommendation. My son was just starting in computer programming so he declined the job opportunity to finish college but I was impressed at how well Udemy taught him.

If you do sign up, don't buy it that day...wait and you will get a coupon in the mail with a very good discount. This is the class he took: https://www.udemy.com/3dmotive-intro-to-c-programming-and-scripting-for-games-in-unity/#/

There are lots of other good classes there as well. Worth a try!

 

@Teila @evan140 I can confirm that college is useless and that I learned nothing from it in 4 years. That being said, the ez-scrubfest-4-year-waste-of-time-and-money-and-now-crippling-debt did give me a lot of free time to learn on my own and practice things loosely based on the class.

Then days into the semester turn into a project that displayed every topic of the syllabus and ask the teacher for my A, and then turning the class into an independent study so I could screw around and do whatever I wanted and still get credit for the class.

College may have done nothing but worsen my tendency to manipulate people while they're distracted by my generally hilarious persona.

The massive growth of my post count over the past few months should indicate the kind of free time I've had during classes I still recommend game dev for college though since the major is under IT and with an IT degree you have a very large range of jobs you can get. And with the game dev classes, you'll have a ton of practical experience with programming by yourself and in groups. And you can also take the CS courses as an IT student so you can take those 1 or 2 fun CS classes that are actually more than just math and theory. This semester with 280 and 252 I both *learned a little ARM assembly and I made my own [terrible] interpreted programming language in C++.

*learned - completed assignments 2-3 weeks ahead of time and browsed the unity forums during class

 

@Tomnnn, I can tell you that college is not a waste of time for everyone. You learn a lot more than just what you need for your future job. I am proud of my son, who just graduated with honors and an A.A. degree. He has learned a lot of things other than programming and has turned into a well rounded individual. The next two years should be fun for him.

Anyway....where did you go to school to have crippling debt? Most people I know who were left with a great deal of debt went to those for-profit schools they advertise on TV. My son did not. I wouldn't allow it. He will come out with very little debt and a computer science degree. Will he get a great job and make lots of money? That is up to him, but he will have the tools he needs. Nothing in life is guaranteed.

My education is something I never regret and I won't be done paying off my loans until next fall. I did go to graduate school so that added to the expense, but still...that was a very long time ago. So glad I did it though and I have memories and knowledge that feeds my soul.

Not for everyone I guess. I do not want to get into a discussion of whether it is good to go to college...I just get sad when I see people slamming college. Yeah, if your only choice is Full Sail, you might have a lot of debt. If you don't like to take literature and ethics classes along with science and math, then college might not be for you. But outside of this Unity thread, I know very few people who regret their education.

 

Being well rounded is for squares. See what I did there?

Actually for 4 years, my debt is only ~$26,000. It's crippling though because my income is currently $0. It was a comedic exaggeration since I'll probably pay it off in 6 months after finding a job.

Except for taxes and death My history teacher in high school said this almost every day.

My fondest memory is tutoring a grad student in a machine learning course by teaching myself big data clustering techniques over night for a cs600 level class when I was a sophomore Maybe I should have tried being a genius and skip the college thing altogether. I made a few friends I guess, but I'm kind of anti-social so I missed out a lot on what some people consider the best part of their experienced. I also discovered that my comedy can be dangerous and posses people, causing their arms to flail about and knock nearby fluids onto their machines...

Now we're both thinking it. I wasted 4 years for nothing

Elizabeth warren went to college for $50 and her single mother supported a family of 3 on minimum wage. College nowadays is just for the government to profit off of our attempts to better ourselves. I hope to disappoint them by paying it all off within a year from may 17th :3

I think due to an unsubsidized loan they're going to make a total of $500 off me, based on it growing ~$100 per year since it was given. Those jerks.

I don't regret it one bit. Despite the likely possibility that it was a waste of time, I thoroughly enjoyed observing my determined but impotent 'competition'. It's actually what made me want to be a teacher, since I am a proven effective tutor whether the class is introductory python or graduate level machine learning & big data algorithms.

I feel like the world will be a better place if I raise others to my standards instead of succumbing to capitalism and selfishly securing my own little slice of heaven on earth.

Dat reply length though. I guess I've got passionate mixed feelings about the past 4 years I also believed I've foiled the claim on this thread that your time on these forums decreases the length of your posts, haha. This is probably the biggest one yet for me!

 

The entertainment value we gained from this was well worth the student loan you had to acquire. I'll miss you when you get back out to the real world.

But don't worry, you'll be back. After a couple of years in the wild you'll figure out how to balance entertaining us with not being fired.

 

Yeah, well, join the crowd! lol

Yeah, I will miss Tomnnn as well. He always makes me laugh even when I don't expect it!

 

You never know, I could still throw it all away and go on to be a comedian. I've really been stepping it up lately and getting laughs out of people I didn't expect to. I don't even try anymore, it's all about how you choose to word something... anything really. It would appear that just about any bit of information can be made humorous, and even more so when people identify you as usually saying humorous things.

You know how sometimes the presence of other people's laughter makes it hard not to laugh, especially if they're trying to hold it in? I feel like I've captured that in my avatar, so it might be a little unfair regarding the laughs. Then again I'm sure it's horrifying for young fan girls who refuse to believe james franco can do that with his face.

No promises. I could be the next Doug Walker!

 

I don't have a problem with the amount of work to learn, but the signal to noise ratio is a good way to put it. There's no "standard" or basic concepts people have put together. Like if I were to start teaching you art, I would without a doubt teach the elements and principles of design. I actually rarely see these mentioned in lessons. I've never once seen them mentioned in a formal photography course.

Like, when I was trying to learn how to do flash photography, I tried for like a year or so and broke a flash worth $400 or something. It was so damn hard. I looked at guides online, bought books. Struggled with it. Then one day I discovered a class that made it so unbelievably simple. So simple it made it so frustrating to put up with all of that useless and bad information. I know for a fact that there's a lot of bad lessons to learn photography. I am a master of that craft, and I quantify bad lessons as something I know will waste your time and money.

A good example of how bad tutorials are, is that I didn't have a clear understanding until recently how to use a class as an argument in a method. I did 3 months of lynda.com and didn't walk away with a fluent understand of that simple concept. That's a $75 investment that failed me as a student.

And also, @BoredMormon, once I got the basics down I started picking it up a lot faster. I've spent my time experimenting with a sleep mechanic for an "NPC", based off of the real world neurology of sleep. It actually works, just like a human brain does. A person wakes up, and then gets more awake, and then progressively tired and changes states. Eventually it passes out and gets rest. It will rest until the integers balance themselves back out and it wakes up.

I'm actually really comfortable with what I've done so far. I'm currently trying to figure out how to create a simple choice system, based on very simple but abstract logic, to determine behavior. So I've been trying to figure out how to implement it. Yeah, I know. Make a flappy birds clone for my first game. I'm not interested. I'd much rather play with creating an interesting NPC mechanic. It's way more fun.

Anyways, my point is that I am slowly but surely getting it, but it would be a lot better if it were actually easier to learn.

 

Not everyone learns the same way, so what you think of as "bad" is probably making other people go, "Oh, that's easy! I totally get it now!"

--Eric

 

@Teila, isn't Udemy like hundreds of dollars for single courses or was that some other site?

 

What tutorials were you doing? Were they Unity-specific?

A huge issue I see all the darn time is people trying to teach (or learn) Unity without first teaching/explaining/learning the foundation skills it builds upon. Scripting Unity requires that you understand programming. Making scenes in Unity requires that you know 2D or 3D art. So on and so forth. Owning a guitar does not mean I can play it.

Also, since it's my field, I know darn well why universities call their degrees "Computer Science" rather than "Programming". Programming isn't the point. Problem solving is the point, and learning the broader field of computer science arms you with a whole lot of tools to aid in using computers to solve problems. Being able to write code is just one of them. From working with artists, sound designers/composers, graphic designers, etc. I'm pretty sure that the same can be said of most if not all other fields. Being able to play a guitar does not mean I understand music.

And then there's "game development", which sits on top all of those and also includes stuff like team work, project management, budgeting, etc. Understanding music doesn't mean I can manage a band and/or complete a stuido album.

What all that boils down to is... if you want to be a game programmer, don't "learn Unity". Learn programming, and use your programming in Unity.

 

To be fair, what's the higher cost - "hundreds of dollars" or "months of your life"?

 

Oh, and when selecting learning resources and/or institutions, don't base the selection on the advertising pitch. Find some experienced and/or professional practitioners and ask them what resources and/or institutions they'd recommend.

 

Pittance compared to a CS degree.

 

@even140

We use pluralsight at work to keep the teams skill sets up to date. You can get a free 10 day trial. you can then subscribe for just one month @ $29. It is video based trainnig and most people in the team think it is a great way to learn.

 

Well on that we can agree.

But from personal experience (i am a "young" guy) then the people from my generation that i meet through university and work very often meet those requirements. I don't think we became more lazy, i just think it is easier to notice lazy people with things like the internet now a day.

 

My school has you take python as your first programming course. I tutored an awful lot of python. People's questions tend to be about logic and algorithms more than the language itself, and that is what concerns me. Knowing syntax is worthless without knowing how to solve problems.

With that said, seriously, check out quill18creates. That's a video series that covers everything from making a basic game, how to do procedural generation for a road system and there's even some networking tutorials.

 

Not all courses are that much.

And they go on sale a lot. They are having a big $19 sale at the moment. Look at this one: https://www.udemy.com/unitycourse/?dtcode=Q2D17FA2RtjZ One of my team members is taking this one at the moment and I bought it for my son too. The class is normally $197 so $19 is a great deal!

Also if a class you want is too expensive...sign up, wait a day or so and you will get a great coupon. They send them regularly. I don't think we have ever paid full price for any of them. The classes have been very good so far though. My daughters take some of them as a supplement to their homeschooling. They have classes in so many subjects and areas.

 

I think there are more distractions. If I had been able to spend hours browsing the internet to satiate my love of researching obscure facts, I probably would never have finished school, and certainly would not have gone to graduate school. I had to pay long distance phone charges to talk to my out-of-state friends. Now I can spend hours free on Skype. Paying by the minute really curbs your phone time. While beer and alcohol was a lot cheaper in my time and so was gas, those distractions meant actually getting up and going out, making definite plans with people. I will admit, socializing was my biggest distraction in college...parties, and road trips. But had I had the means to socialize at the tips of my fingers or a smart phone in my pocket at all times...who knows.

Teens I know today are not eager to drive. Gas is expensive and they can chat with friends all day long on their computer. They can play video games and make new friends. Their worlds are larger than mine. My trip to Russia in college was a huge deal...but now I know plenty of Russian folks on the internet and we can chat about our cultural differences whenever we want.

Lazy was probably a wrong word to use. I think they are more impatient than we were. Not because they are different, but because they are accustomed to getting things immediately, whether it is social interaction or buying a book with a touch of a button or having so much entertainment available right now.

I don't envy kids today. I would never want to give up what I had and replace with smartphones and MMO's and Skype. Not that I don't appreciate the modern conveniences but to me they are simply tools. My eldest curled up in a fetal position and cried like the world was ending when I took her phone away for talking loudly all night long....that disturbed me. I remember getting angry when the car keys were denied to me but I didn't see it as the end of the world. It didn't disconnect me from everything I loved.

 

That's essentially what you do when you take someone's phone/internet now. The parenting advice I can offer you from the perspective of someone who's gone through the reverse side of that - at least let your kids notify their friends that they're going to suddenly disappear for an undetermined amount of time and that they're not dead when the replies stop coming.

There are things I probably can't say on the public forums, but for some people, the perceived loss of a friend due to such circumstances has literally been the end of their world by their own volition.

 

Well...I didn't take away her friends. They still were there and they still contacted her via the computer. She just wasn't able to keep us all up at night anymore. Her first choice was to put the phone away at night but she couldn't deal with that either.

I also had issues with my son playing games on his phone constantly, plugging it in, and then playing games again...repeat, repeat, while on a family vacation. He rarely sees his grandmother and he spent every moment on the phone until I "lost" the charger conveniently. I am a mean mom, I guess.

As for parenting advice....I learned. My other kids do not have phones of their own. We have one family phone that is not a smart phone that we give them when they go somewhere. It helps that my kids are homeschooled because they are not gone all day long every day.

 

Thanks for the heads-up, but I should point out that I didn't see the discount mentioned on Udemy's site but on Mighty Deals. Bought it through MD and they gave me a coupon code for Udemy (all I had to do was follow a link).

http://www.mightydeals.com/deal/unity-developer-course.html

 

There have always been distractions in one way or another. People will always find something they rather do than school work . <
We might have more distractions at our hand, but we also grew up with it, which mean we also learns how to handle it from childhood.
Got a little brother who is only 10 years old. He plays a lot of computer with his friends, but they also do a lot of outdoor activities and does well in school. He grew up with all this new technology, but funny enough i think he and his friends handles it better than me and my friends did.

I am finally finishing my master thesis in June, and i worked for a few different games company for the last 2 years WHILE being in school. So it is possible to do stuff with all these distractions. And i am not some special case or freak of nature

 

That's how it's done right I've never seen people so crippled by the removal of technology. I think someone who's pacemaker just shut down would have a less extreme reaction than a youngin' who lost a phone/xbox. I got my first phone I think in early high school, and it was a flip phone that I used to film random things. I got my first smartphone in the last year of high school and I'm guilty of being on it at family vacations, but it's usually college related or telling friends that I'm busy at a family event and can't talk much lol.

You softy

How old is he? If he can stay up late, you can try what my mom did and try to enforce "family now, games later". Or you could make him play ninja gaiden. That's like the ultimate game that forces you to take a break from it because it continually introduces new enemies and bosses that are quite difficult to fight because they're so diverse. I took a break from it for 2 years once when I got stuck on the alma fight in the church... it teaches you that breaks have a positive effect on your performance heh.

I was thinking of trying to put something together for Udemy and similar, but I realized I'm better at answering questions than putting a syllabus together :c

 

Strictly from a business standpoint I think Unity would make a killing if they released an official Unity book that walked through all of the engine features and how to make a complete game. Sure this information is available in pieces around the internet but people are willing to pay for an official source.

Then if they really want to rake in the $$$ they release the Unity Developer certification - certs are just another method for printing money with low overhead for the business offering them.

 

Mostly I just notice that Hippocoder and Eric5h5 are responding to less forum threads. Which makes me sad.......kind of lol

Or maybe, I am posting less questions than I used to, so I don't notice Hippo or Eric's posts as much anymore?

 

He is an adult in college now and is very cognizant of his addiction to games. He has learned to control it. Also, until he can pay for it, he does not have a smart phone anymore.

 

I don't think you realize how special you are. Millions of people play games but only a fraction actually make a career out of making games. I have known more kids who play lots of games and whose parents don't recognize the problem until they drop out of school than I do those who actually become game developers. I am often the one they ask to teach their kids game development to give them some kind of future. 99% of the time, the kids do not accept my offer. They want to play, not learn. I also know adults who drop out of life to play games.

Over the years, I have come to realize that there are a lot of people out there who simply are happy with the simple things in life. I sometimes envy them. But you worked hard, managed to go to college and graduate school while working. That is not happening with the majority of the population, at least not in my country. Of course maybe education is valued more where you are.

 

Maybe they'd be interested in learning how to mod? The first game dev class in a series of 3 is how to mod quake2. The class after that is writing a game from scratch with sdl 1.2 for graphics and C... and that's it lol. The third class involved making your own 3D engine with OpenGL but I'm going to graduate before it's available :c

That's my plan as soon as I'm financially set

 

Yeah of cause there is a lot of difference based on culture. I am from Denmark, where education is free. They even give you some money each month while studying.

Actually it is a problem that we have too many with higher educations and less people willing to take jobs in sections that requires less education

 

I can imagine. But still...you are lucky. We are trying to figure out how we are going to send two daughters to college in a couple of years. It is horrendously expensive and I refuse to let my kids go deep into debt at such young ages. A lot of bright kids here are unable to go and that is sad.

 

I imagine they already mod but modding doesn't always move on to something bigger.

 

How does it compare to the cost of moving to Denmark?

 

Can only imagine, must be a horrible burden. My parents were by no means wealthy at all, so i am happy that i grew up in country, where your own skills/mindset are your only limit more or less.

 

But then again, we pay the highest taxes in the world more or less aswell

 

Well, that depends on how you look at it. When the average public education is 12k a year, that overcomes a tax burden, especially if you have more than one kid.

 

That's funny actually, here in the UK we have a similar situation, though in a different way.
Our education isn't free anymore (though we get interest-free loans for it) but we do get a lot of graduates finding it difficult finding work in their area of expertise. I know a lot of my colleagues have gone on to work in coffee shops or supermarkets (though some of them studied History, what were you expecting).
We also have a lot of people not going for higher education and refusing to work in the not-so-good sectors, interestingly we do get lots of willing migrant workers doing those jobs, then people complain they take our jobs...

All anecdotal of course, but there you go

 

I worked freelance for two different game companys in London this past year. So i am stealing your jobs!

 

I guess that narrows the light slightly of places to pick from when I flee the USA. I consider it a crime against humanity to run health care and or education like business to turn a profit. If you're gating humanity's potential to make money then you should be eaten alive by snails

 

There was a while in Australia where the education system got pushed to far out of balance by free university education. Everyone did advanced degrees, and the supply of apprentices into the trades dried up. It led to situations where plumbers, carpenters, electricians and the like could pretty much write their own paycheck. The balance is being corrected now, the government has realised the value of funding trades education as well.

Here in NZ education isn't free, but it is heavily subsidised. And student loans are structured in such a way to make them pretty painless. You don't pay any interest, and you don't pay a cent back until you start earning money. All that said we still have low rates of higher education, which is unfortunate.

 

That is starting to happen here too. For a while it was only the for-profit schools that were concentrating on trade and technical programs. Many of the "game development" programs here are still in these schools. They charge over 100k for a 2-3 year degree and students are coming out with debt that they can't pay with the low paying jobs these degrees get them.

Some states and government agencies are noticing the problems but rather than go after the schools, they have started limiting aid. So if you start college and change your major you might not be able to get enough financial aid to pay for your degree. You want to take a few classes extra in an area that you feel might add to your degree, such as a business class or two? Too bad..if it isn't on your degree list, you can't get aid to pay for it.

It amazes me that these schools that have over a 60% default rate on student loans continue to be accredited. Profit reigns I guess, even if it takes money out of the pockets of future consumers.

Oh, and a lot of public community colleges are now adding more and more technical programs and trades degrees. I love this and encourage everyone I know to go to a school where you can pay 3k a year rather than 25k. Aid might even cover the entire cost.

 

Every once in a while something like this happens, that reminds me there are still plenty of cultural differences left in the world. I get the impression we are talking about two totally different things with student loans. Here a student loan is not paid back until you are actually earning money. Its also taken straight out of your wages along with your taxes. So its almost impossible to default on student loan. And of course the payment scale is graduated, so the more you earn, the more you need to pay back. This system generally drops student loans out of the "difficult to buy food" area and into the "difficult to save for a house deposit" area.

 

Yeah, not so here. You pay it back 6 months after you are no longer a student, whether you have a job or not. You can get forbearance and have payments waved for a specific period of time but interest does accrue. Some loans, those not subsidized, have higher interest rate and accrue interest while you are in school. My guess is those are the ones that cause the defaults. Payments can be graduated but that does increase the interest paid. Also, many expensive schools cannot be fully paid with financial aid because they cost so much. So a lot of students take out private student loans or their parents do at even higher interest rates. If you go to Harvard, maybe..but going to a for-profit school like Full Sail or Institute of Technology is not worth the money. Your take home pay will suffer a great deal. If you don't pay, they take the money out of tax returns..which works only if you have a job and pay taxes.

So those taxes we pay here? Lots of them go to for-profit schools to pay them the money that the government promised the students would pay back. And the government, instead of closing those schools or limiting the money the students can borrow for those schools, just lets it happen.

 

Ouch.

I deleted everything else I typed out, as I've been warned in the past for derailing threads with too much aggressive talk about politics. But ouch sums it up.

 

Government shouldn't close the schools, but not limiting the money is a huge problem. Students don't care about how they are going to pay the money back. They only care about how they are going to get the money. If $25,000 wasn't as easy to get as $3000, then the expensive schools would be out of business unless they lowered prices. But if you suggest giving less money instead of more money, people accuse you of hating poor people. The reality is that the distortion of the market hurts the poor far more than limiting what they could take out would.

Milton Friedman proposed a similar system, and Yale tried a version of it, but it didn't take off: https://www.insidehighered.com/view...-was-actually-financial-aid-progressive-essay