Is this just my pessimism or what?

Wow, what have you been doing for a year and a half? Is the stuff in your sig really the game you're referring to? How much time have you actually spent on it?

I mean ive been 'working' on inferno for years (it was nearly the first project I started in Unity), but total time actually working on it is significantly less.. I havnt touched the project in over a year I dont think.

Sometimes I find having some proper models helps... if you have any money to spend, maybe you can pick-up some asset packs that will help encourage you... They dont need to be expensive. Have a look at 3drt.com. I use that site for all my model needs. Covers a lot of bases and everything is done by the same person, so its consistent.

 

Because providing a physical space for your mind to inhabit is a more permanent way to leave your mark on this existence than children are.

My youtube channel will grow in late 2016 when I establish a singular presence and identity online.

 

It takes a lot of guts to work with your passions and not get daunted or be overwhelmed by the project. Time always seems to be the enemy, slowing things down and putting up obstacles; yet it's a matter of perspective and hind sight needed. Did you send the time well in the long run, learn something valuable out of it so you can do it better or differently next time round?

Stand up for you're dream! That being said, be reasonable and practical about about it at different stages of the project and as your skills improve. Do what you do best and enlist the help of others for the things you are not so good at. Feedback does help a lot, so get out there and talk about it in different paces.

Myself, I've worked on a graphic novel using 3D graphics for the images (some 250+ panels on 52 pages), creating everything from scratch almost and spent 10 years doing it on my own. All the hard work is now being directed toward creation of a game.

 

Jesus christ. I enjoy reading message boards, but right now I don't want to read all of your responses >_< From what I HAVE read though, you guys have some solid advice.

 

Make smaller games but try to have a common thread & package them as party games or even a sample bag, like show bags where you get a bit of everything so you can sample lots of stuff?

 

I don't understand your obsession with being smart. I assume that's very deep and important to you, based on your username, avatar, and signature. I think you would probably be better off not focusing on that as it seems to be driving you a little nuts where you over analyse everything and sort of panic. Why not just really you know, smoke a fatty - as an analogy of course - and chill out?

I can't see how any of this is remotely helpful to you, just my honest opinion.

 

Command line tools are cool. Documentation is cool. Writing your own traffic accounting system using shell scripts and iptables is cool.

Then half a year later you realize that to get stuff done you need windows system and dual-booting between the two back and forth is royal pain.

Not sure if it is worth it.

Linux OS is worth studying if you're messing with robotics, computer clusters and one day want to finally build that "giant killer robot of death by fire" or something, cause there's high chance that at least some one part of this thing will run on raspberry pi and it will have linux on it. For many other people, however, learning linux will be a waste of time. Artist or a composer most likely will gain nothing from that. Also, community can be quite toxic.

 

You don't actually have to dual boot if you plan your hardware selection accordingly. Hardware virtualization has reached the point where we can pass hardware devices on the computer through to the VM. This allows the VM to directly access the hardware as if it weren't running in a VM to begin with.

Basically the processor and motherboard need to have support for IOMMU (aka Intel VT-d and AMD-Vi) in addition to normal CPU virtualization (aka Intel VT-x and AMD-V).

With IOMMU you can simply add and configure one graphics device, one sound device, etc for each OS. Performance losses have been shown to be around 3% by Linus Tech Tips during their experiments with building computers that could handle up to seven gamers at once with Linux as a host OS.

https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/519293-7-gamers-1-cpu-ultimate-virtualized-gaming-build-log/

 

At the time when I was interested in linux, virtual machine wasn't a viable option, because support for virtualization was quite poor. Right now situation is a bit different, because you can run multiple linux machines and make a network out of them on the same computer (I saw one ex-sys admin do that. Was quite interesting).

At some point in future I might dedicate some hdd space to some sort of mini linux vm, because I occasionally run into software that only works in unix-likes. (making something like caffee run on windows can be difficult). IIRC vagrant grants you simple linux shell this way.

Another thing is, I haven't yet seen a way to fully forward CUDA/OpenCL functionality from host to guest.

Either way, I still have the same opinion - unless you're interested in some very specific areas, there's not much point in learning linux. I'd guess most of the people on those forums wouldn't benefit from it.

 

If your life does not depends on you making full games then maybe you should try modding instead of making games. Modding an existing game gives you an starting point and your mind will quickly start to pitch you out ideas to create. Maybe your existing games can be created with mods? Popular modable games have huge communities of players ready to pick your mod and give it a shot. Modding games will let you have results quicker as you barely need to concentrate on Assets or code you are picking an existing one) and then if the modable game allows to it you can replace assets with your's, add/change scripts and turn the thing into something you'll be proud off.

Another thing to try is Machinima (short 3D movies) with existing Machinima tools and/or Game Engines. Quite often people just want to express emotions and tell a story and you don't need a whole full fledged game for it.

Ultimately, if what you really want is to create a game then by all means, plan something small, even a small little demo that can be accomplished very quickly.

Lastly, ask yourself what you really want to accomplish and what it will give you in return if you invest the required amount of time on it.

 

I totally agree. For the two last years I was in an highschool that is 15 minutes away from my home. Now my university is 1 hour away from my home, meaning waking up earlier, way more homework, less time to work with Unity and less time to play, leading to way less sleep time ( between 2-4 hours of sleep for 10-12 hours of work the day ). This is an ultimate despressing combo... I want to become a game developper, or at least a software developper, but how would I become it if I can't practice game development because of lack of free time ? I can't keep up anymore, and starting to have pretty dark ideas...

From my personnal experience, DON'T MESS UP WITH SLEEP TIME, or you will pay it one day or another...
Try to manage your free time better than me, I think it won't be very hard, but don't reduce sleep time unless you want to become a zombie that can't study, can't work, can't play, and can't have fun on Unity.

 

I don't recall where in this thread someone said it (I think it @ShadowK) but they said its funny how we say things to others as advice and then ignore them ourselves. It was essentially something like that (paraphrasing here).

Does that mean that nobody can be prevented from doing what they just freaking' feel like doing? I mean if you don't even listen to your own advice, and nobody takes your advice then does that mean giving advice most of the time is useless? I think its a human thing to get advice and then just continue on doing whatever it is that you do. Because trying new things is scary, and hard sometimes.

@hippocoder I think what you said about being "obsessed with being smart" has a valid point. But I am not "obsessed". In fact this avatar/username was created for fun, and partially as a confidence thing. That's partially why I'm a bit miffed about everything you said but I'm taking that with a grain of salt. You seem like a (sort of) salty British guy. that's to be expected! I think maybe I do talk about it lots or it comes out a bunch. The avatar was meant to be like a logo for who is behind my games (me), I tried to add "Engineering" or "Games" or "Studio" somewhere on it but due to the squariness of the avatar, that was not possible. So its just "Brainy". I also wanted it to match the username with a few e's. Couldn't make it fit.

 

I'm not actually trying to annoy you but it's genuine puzzlement. I don't think focussing on perceptual things helps you. Instead channel your energy into a 'just do it' attitude perhaps will help more?

 

Too right hardest thing to overcome.

 

Interesting @hippocoder what do you mean by "perceptual things"? Not sure how but someone comment on another thread I made (two?) months ago that I forgot about. I think this is the second time that I've made a thread about this. Hmm. I am beginning to see a pattern here, and perhaps that would be fixed by "just doing" it.

Or as Shia Lebouf would say:

edit: I feel like this motivational speech by our friend Shia Lebouf was made specifically for this kind of situation XD literally!

 

Crazy

okey i am doing it.

 

Nice way to put it in perspective, never actually looked at it like that.
For me I guess (from a graphics standpoint, at least) my level is somewhere at the mid-2000's.

OP's problem might be not being good enough at maths (just my assumption, didn't mean to offend) to deal with stuff like smooth motion, calculating angles... you know the works. That was (and somewhat still is) where most of MY major roadblocks came from.
(Dear God how many weeks I spent trying to "get" the maths behind ray-triangle & sphere-triangle intersection back in the day).

Which incidentally is exactly where Unity, hell, where MOST engines are still somewhat lacking is in helper functions; stuff like, for example:

Code (CSharp):

1. myObject.faceObject(otherObject)
2. myObject.orbitAround(otherObject, angleVector)

Obviously in the long run programmers should make the effort to understand what the helper functions actually do, but it's always good to have training wheels to fall back on when you need them.