Is the Unity Community too big?

They do limit the money, which is fine. But not all the loans are government loans and it would be impossible to tell people they can't take out private loans. Maybe if the banks didn't give out the loans that would help.

I disagree about the schools. They should be required to have certain qualifications to keep their accredidation such as graduating a certain percentage of the students, repayment numbers for student loans, placement numbers, and salary levels compared to public schools for graduating students...among other things.

A school that takes a students money, doesn't help to place them in a job, doesn't work with the students to up graduation rates, and whose degree is not worthy of a salary equal to a public school degree should not be allowed to receive financial aid from the government. Sorry..my opinion of course. Keep the schools open, by all means. Let them take private loans..but if the students default on the loans, the banks won't be bailed out by the government and they will stop giving loans to students at those schools. THAT is how the market works.

 

I'm not sure we are disagreeing as much as you think. Whether the financial aid comes straight from the government, or from a bank that assumes zero risk because the government will bail them out if they make poor decisions isn't a significant difference in my eyes.

 

I'd struggle to see this system working on an individual class or university level. Socialism just doesn't work well that way. You have to run it at a country level.


I'd also see any socialist programme struggling to run in America. Your culture is too individualistic and freedom loving for such a scheme to work. And lets face it, for the average American to give up liberty would be very un-American. I can totally sympathise with not wanting to give up key aspects of culture and identity. Plenty of things I wouldn't give up that might not make sense to an outsider.

 

That may be the first time anyone has called Friedman a socialist. He was actually one of the biggest proponents of individual liberty and freedom. But he was by no stretch of the imagination a conservative (though our liberals like to paint him that way). The definition of "individual liberty" as defined by our conservatives is vastly different than that as defined by our classical liberals. But real (classical) liberals don't have a very strong presence here in the states, so you get the conservative version.

The beauty of his plan is that colleges which give crap education are going to get crap ROI. The ones that provide massive opportunities for the students will see a windfall. Providing a good education therefore becomes the most important thing to the college instead of simply becoming a degree mill.

The problem with it isn't so much the socialism aspect. It's the fact that it socializes both the gains and the losses. People want their losses to be socialized and their gains to be all for themselves.

 

We give up a lot of liberties..such as the "liberty" to have affordable health care, and the "liberty" to have affordable education, the "liberty" to let others practice their various religions or NOT practice any religion without being branded with all sorts of evil labels..I could go on and on and on. lol

Most of us don't even know what we have given up until we meet people like you.

Yeah, hard to label Friedman.

 

Getting back to the subject of this thread...the community is not too big, as far as I am concerned. The ability to learn from so many, not only about game development, but the way other people live and think and educate themselves. I find it interesting and eye-opening for me and I am old. I am glad this sort of place is here for the young folks on the forum.

 

Didn't take long for that to get political again, and I wasn't even involved this time

@Teila those 'freedom-from' freedoms finally started coming up on the republican side in the news But unfortunately for the wrong use, of course. They want the government to take away the freedom of some people being able to get married because it gives them the freedom of... I dunno, some stupid reasoning I can't quite follow. But they did clearly state that somehow the government taking something away would actually be granting them a sort of freedom.

I definitely want to move before America is a full blown theocracy and a mob of family values advocates comes on by to cave my skull in with rocks.

 

I'm also of that opinion. The challenge is managing growth, and integrating new users quickly. This should be the focus, rather then trying to reduce the number of users. Ultimately that's not going to happen anyway, one of Unity's state business strategies is to make game development available to the masses.

And back to politics, I can't bring myself to actually type out the term that Unity uses to describe bringing game development to the masses. Such a massive misuse of the word.

 

I don't know what the word is No matter of word abuse can worse than american freedom defense initiative.

Does Unity3D want to reach out and touch someone?

 

Only if you are using the personal edition and make over 100k.

 

Isn't the Learn section working towards exactly that, except that it's free? With Unity's goal being to democratise things it could be that they'd rather not charge for such things. Plus, something isn't automatically better just because it costs money.

I do think it'd be neat if Unity could help out with what I said in my last post, and perhaps point people to a few 3rd party sources which are actually solid for people who want more than the Learn section covers - eg: if you want to learn programming, here's 3 sources we think are great, if you want to learn 3D modelling, here's 3 sources we think are great, etc.

That could even take the form of a few blog posts, and be personal recommendations from employees rather than the company.

 

Also, such a concept flies in the face of what Unity is in the first place. Unity is an extremely flexible all-purpose tool for creating games. It's designed from the ground up to be able to create almost any game. Making a book that walks people through just one game would be almost useless for Unity.

No, I think the on-line documentation route they are going now is better.

 

I would love a book. I could curl up in a comfy chair and read it. Videos are great, but I retain info better if I read it rather than try to hear and watch at the same time. I am weird that way.

 

I think people seriously overestimate the ability of the masses. I've been teaching the masses (ie relatively unselected students) for over 25 years. For the past 12 I've been teaching programming at tertiary level to students in the 50 - 70 percent range of academic ability (ATAR score in Victorian VCE exams) and after 2 years involving programming each semester only about 10% of them are in any way competent as programmers. I've always had a very democratic approach to teaching (as in let's try to give everyone something of benefit to them), and perhaps I'm a bad teacher (although other teachers get similar results) but I think it's a waste of time marketing to anyone who is not in the top 25% of academic ability (mix of intelligence, diligence, motivation etc)

 

Most of my students wouldn't read a book. Only about 2% acquire the recommended reference text for my programming courses. Most have trouble reading my lecture notes, and having taught year 8 students I know how to simplify concepts.

 

Plus look at the horrors of keeping a book up to date.

Any particular skilled profession requires a particular skill set and a particular aptitude. I'm not arguing for elitism here, accepting only the top 25% on any test brings its own challenges. But I do try an encourage people to develop skills in the things they are naturally good at. Most artists aren't wired to be coders, and vice versa. But most people are wired to do something well.

 

You might be right but you really don't always know who is going to do well with programming until you try to teach them. I am a pretty bright person, but I can't grasp programming or math, for that matter. I mean I made it through Calculus I and II, but barely. Physics almost crushed me. But I did well in my other classes. And my son started life in special education, a child we adopted at 4 who had all sorts of issues. I pulled him out of school and homeschooled him. He graduated with honors last week and is a talented programmer, according to his professors.

Sadly, if we were to limit our teaching to the upper level of intelligence, we might miss people who have special talents in specific areas but don't test well, or had emotional issues that prevented them from excelling in the lower grades, or came from a stressful or impoverished background.

But...as one who taught college at one time, I also get what you mean. Sometimes it feels like you are talking and no one is listening. You have to just bask in the few people who are and know you are making a difference to them.

 

Do these people elect to take a programming class, or is it part of some standard curriculum? I think people are going to do a lot better at something they really want to do. Of course, they have to really want to do it for the right reasons. There is a difference between saying "I want to make a game" and saying "I want to be a programmer." You need some measure of programming ability to make a game, and it that isn't your cup of tea then you are going to get frustrated really quickly. That is where I believe the disconnect between really wanting to do something and actually being able to do it occurs.

I'm sure that any number of those students who cannot excel at programming are more than capable of excelling at something that you or I might not be able to. The key in life is finding what you are good at.

 

If my university adopted my policy I'd be out of a job. Perhaps I've had a few too many classes lately where literally no one is listening, or in many cases, even turning up.

 

Its a general IT program, mix of computer systems, networking, database, programming, web programming, and some maths. I think most students who come to us pick our program because they don't know what else to do. "I like computers so I'l try this".

 

If you read the notes for the reasons for the change it's ridiculous. My school wanted me to buy the sixth edition of a book and when I read the changes from the 5th edition it said that chapter 2 and 7 were swapped...

Would incorporating game dev into your classes help? I've seen some pretty unmotivated people actually get stuff done when faced with the challenge to make something useful out of C and sdl 1.2.

 

The probably come to your program because they like video games. Just the other day a mom in our neighborhood asked us to talk to her son. He doesn't know what he wants to do. She thinks he would be a good video game developer because he likes to play video games more than anything else.

So we have come full circle in this thread. lol

 

I don't think that is the type of changes he was talking about. More like the type of changes where a book on Unity 4 will lead to broken code if you try to use it in Unity 5.

 

I have a colleague who is adopting more of a project based approach in a different program, involving game dev type scenarios, but he's not getting significanlty better results with it.

The networking teachers tell me that much more scripting is being required in the new Cisco courses. It's changing from a hardware focus to more a network management focus. I think students will be required to learn Python to do networking now. Good luck to them. Most can't do subnet masking.

 

Of course by this logic then every lazy person in the world would probably make an awesome TV actor/writer/producer/director/whatever...

 

Ha! You are right!

 

I don't know about that, because the point isn't the game that gets made. It's getting people familiar at an introductory level with each aspect of a game's development, so that they have a starting point for more detailed learning in their area of choice.

I'm somewhat regularly asked by high school kids or their parents about doing work experience in my office. I always ask what aspect of game development interests them. Their answer's are usually equivalent to either "all of it" or "there are different aspects?"

 

This is true, Cisco ACI is all Python based and the more and more SDN gets popular you are going to need to think software to be a good networking person. It is going to make a lot of people's heads explode in the industry.

 

That's definitely a valid reason to update haha.

 

Well, we can disagree that's ok I haven't gone through all the Learn topics they have now but the ones I have done seem ok about showing you "hey here's this feature" in isolation, but a really poor job on how you would realistically apply it to a real game, mainly due to their time limitation.

The recent thread on the forums about "how do I structure my game" comes to mind as a typical issue I've had and many others have. Seeing a example on how delegates make a cube bounce is fine for a hello world but I would like to see how they are applied to a full game. Show us a game with a GameManager singleton designed by a pro, even experienced users might learn a thing or two or a different way of thinking about it.

Just my .02, I would pay for a book like that as I've read books that build a single game in other languages/tools and found I always learn something.

 

Oh I agree they're not there yet - hence "working towards".

My understanding of the goal with Learn is that a part of they aim to cover a few complete game projects. There's a Stealth one there already, right?

 

As far as those who are curious are concerned, there is a natural culling process that takes place. They try. They most likely fail. If they are willing to try again, then they are probably cut out for this. If they give up and go back to whatever other hobbies interest them, then that's fine to.

Game development isn't for everyone. But I do like the fact that engines like Unity make it possible for everyone to at least give it a go.

 

Going MrSelmo (tm)

 

Off topic...
@Teila Mentioned Udemy courses earlier.

I just got a email that Udemy have a $10 sale. I think this is for all courses.

https://www.udemy.com/courses/featured/?pmtag=SCORESKILLS1001

Edit: Link for Unity development course

 

Lol, I have one mother at church like this. Sent her son over to me because he spends all day on the computer playing games. Poor kid got bored sitting through coding one explosion.

 

Yeah, maturity matters, I think. My soon to be 15 year old daughter loves code and coding. Weird, because she is an artist, very right brained. But she is also one of those weird really focused, walk in a straight line, sort of people. I don't get it. lol

 

I spent most of my life as an artist and then got really into programming over the past decade. I wondered about what that meant for a while until I understood that code is art.

 

Code is problem-solving. Clean, efficient code is art. (brevity)

 

Now if only I could make my mind accept the opposite, that art is code. Or more to the point that art can be built based on a series of well defined logical principles. Then I'd be away laughing.

As an interesting note its only in recent centuries that we have placed the distinction between the sciences and the arts. It always amuses me talking to my wife (an artist) that we have some of the same historical heroes. Historically many of the great figures in science were also big in the art world. (Or vice versa if you are an artist).

 

I like Dave Archer's art.

I've always been terrible at anything art related. Good thing I can program. I don't know if I'd consider it art. Maybe it's an artist thing to understand other things as art?

 

That is perhaps the most correct interpretation, and certainly how I try to look at the universe and everything in it.

 

It's really cool to see the other side of things. I interpret the entire universe as numbers haha. I'm sure we'll have some fascinating conversations / perspectives on things in the future.

 

The universe is numerical. Numbers are beautiful. Beauty is art. Code is numbers. Code is art.

 

You don't know how hard it was to resist saying "Shrek is love, shrek is life" in response to that.

...apparently too hard. But I agree that numbers are beautiful.

 

Oh mother of dragons, give me my pro tag soon, so i can brag to all my friends!