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Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

blender.org

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Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#151

Awesome. Blender is on the cusp of releasing a major UI overhaul (2.8) that will make it more accessible to newcomers (left-click is now the default!). I'm excited to see it getting some major support from the gaming industry as well as the film industry.

It's not _that_ much of an overhaul imho. I still find it to be weird, coming from other apps (Cinema 4D in my case).

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#152
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given that Tim wants to force everyone to use his crappy launcher This is a pretty wild accusation to make with no lead-up or follow-through.

The store does not have a shopping cart feature, and started flagging people for fraud for buying multiple games in a row during a huge sale

Even if everything you're saying here is 100% true, I don't see how it would support the accusation that Tim wants to force everyone to use his launcher, which is what I quoted and took issue with. Can you explain how the lack of a shopping cart and some mistaken bans are meant to prove the accusation true?

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#153

As someone who's done lots of Blender work as well as Maya and integrations with Unity and Unreal Engine, I still think there's quite a long way to go to make Blender a good option for game development. It's free, it kind of works but it's very painful when it comes to animation, texturing, and details. Right now, this is what I usually do: - Basic Modeling: Blender - Sculpting + Details: ZBrush - Painting: Substance…

Could you please explain what Blender is not good at animation? What major features are missing?

Not OP, but before 2.8 and the depsgraph refactor the viewport was really slow on not so complex scenes. The NLA system (Non Linear Animation) needed some love, since it wasn't so smooth to mix animations (can't recall the details at the moment). The animation library/database, like all of Blender's object system, was a little confusing and was easy to lose your work (e.g. if an animation/datablock was not assign to an object, you would lose it when you restart Blender. The refactor in Collections was a great start in the right direction.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#154
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not evil - it's what has been attracting users to their platforms. PUBG had terrible anti-cheat, really hurt them for a while. In all these claims a reminder that client is trusted. EPIC does "ok" with anti-cheat - be curious to hear others impressions. Cheaters are a TOTAL drag to online multiplayer, so calling efforts to fight cheating "evil" is silly.

> calling efforts to fight cheating "evil" is silly their method (blocking Wine) is questionable though. it reminds me of websites that block Central/Eastern European IP's "because of bots" (yeah, it happens). the goal is nice, but the method hurts many honest users.

As far as I understand, the problem with wine is that the wine sandbox prevents other anticheat mechanism from working.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#155
post #52
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tim Sweeney thinks Win32 is an open standard. I think he's operating with a different understanding of the word "open" than the rest of us.

Quote on that? Also, there's Wine and ReactOS, no? Aren't those two alternative (even if somewhat incomplete) implementations of Win32?

They may be alternative implementations, but they're still no good in this case. See elsewhere in the thread where it's pointed out that Epic's anti-cheat software intentionally fails to run the game if it's running on Wine.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not evil - it's what has been attracting users to their platforms. PUBG had terrible anti-cheat, really hurt them for a while. In all these claims a reminder that client is trusted. EPIC does "ok" with anti-cheat - be curious to hear others impressions. Cheaters are a TOTAL drag to online multiplayer, so calling efforts to fight cheating "evil" is silly.

Yeah, but how does running a Windows game on Linux = cheating? I understand the need for modern multiplayer games to have anticheat (however unfortunate, and I still refuse to play games that use literal rootkit-esque anticheat [1]), but just trying to run a game on Linux isn't cheating in itself. Does Wine help cheats cloak themselves? [1] e.g., https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NProtect_GameGuard

Wine is a fully open implementation of Windows APIs on Linux. The game cannot assume that the API's behavior is fixed on WINE because anyone can change any of the functions to do something unexpected with a quick patch. One example may be hacking up the DirectX implementation to draw some objects as transparent rather than opaque.

Of course, it's possible (if much harder) to go in and hack up the DLLs on Windows. Anti-cheat addresses that by whitelisting known-good MS hashes and/or requiring some type of signing. There's a lot more overhead involved in doing something like that for WINE, since every distro's build would be different, it's common for users to have their own builds with game-specific patches enabled, etc.

I've been out of the WINE scene for a while, but I'll say that I don't believe many WINE users are trying to exploit the platform to cheat. I think it's purely a cost-benefit tradeoff. The vendor doesn't feel supporting a legitimate WINE use case is worth the expense of figuring out a reasonable way to validate behavior, handle integration with distro builds, support debugging/custom patchsets, etc.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't. His actions last month will not have me loving him in a while.

Something I missed? Could you be more specific?

They've decided to completely stop trying to support Linux even on games that already had support and are intentionally disabling any workarounds to keep them running.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Unreal+Blender just fine. What do you mean?

That's the whole point. If you're a carmaker, you want gasoline to be a cheap, widely available commodity. Gasoline complements cars. 3D modelling software has had a long history of expensive, esoteric, difficult-to-use applications. Epic, hoping to make money from large numbers of Unreal Engine licenses, would like to see that situation change. Ideally (for them), 3D modelling software would be free and easy to use…

My question is about OP's assertment:

> Unreal Engine, like Unity, right now has to be used with Autodesk products like 3DS Max or Maya

I am asking why they think this is the case. Not the circular reasoning of "most professionals use it" but I am interested in what they feel the Blender is missing.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#159
post #29

In the spirit of supporting open software, it would be fantastic if Epic Games Store and its DRM warmed up to Linux next. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19844241

The anticheat they use (EAC) for fortnite checks if Wine is in use, and will fail to run the game if it is. This is taken directly from the EAC dll: https://i.imgur.com/a4wBVWz.jpg

"EAC/Wine compatibility is currently in a beta state with several games whose help we appreciate, but significantly more work is needed to get it to a suitably stable and hardened level for all." https://twitter.com/TeddyEAC/status/1125678854390067200

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#160
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anticheat they use (EAC) for fortnite checks if Wine is in use, and will fail to run the game if it is. This is taken directly from the EAC dll: https://i.imgur.com/a4wBVWz.jpg

Can't say I blame them. Linux is ridiculously powerful & versatile as I'm sure we all know...and having that much opportunity to mess with all the net/visual/input subsystems in a way the game can't even see (since it's trapped in WINE) is a major issue cheat wise. Not ideal but I can totally see why a company might from a practical/commercial point of view just block it outright. Especially given player numbers of W…

Windows has no lack of power. All this anti-cheating stuff is mostly a scam to stop the dumbest of the dumb cheaters and probably collect information from your computer that's useful to advertisers/investors/law enforcement agencies.

If I wanted to aimbot in an FPS, I would just analyze the HDMI output from my computer (via an FPGA) and have it directly create the necessary USB transactions to move my mouse to the target's head. I would introduce randomness, "input lag", jitter, and even some misses, so that people looking at the kill cam wouldn't immediately think "aimbot" as they are apt to do whenever they die. (You also don't want to make your mouse movements statistically different from anyone else's, or it's the server that will pick up on your cheating... or at least a well-crafted MapReduce. Do game companies have MapReduce? I hope so.)

Executed well, the developer of the game could do nothing about it; maybe I'm really good, or maybe I'm aimbotting. My computer is completely normal, down to the device descriptors on my mouse and monitor. There's no wine, no virtualization, no additional software running.

In the end, trusting the client is crazy. If you want to decide win/loss based on things computers can do easily, your game is probably bad. And aiming is something computers can do in their sleep.

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