181–190 of 261 posts
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The existence of GIMP doesn't really make less people use Photoshop. The same is true of Blender and Maya.
Because GIMP falls short as a Photoshop replacement, but there are plenty of people using Krita instead of Photoshop.
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Me too, but I suspect at worst it would be like "and make sure to develop and refine the export to UE4 functionality," which is something the community benefits from anyway.
Let's pretend that's explicitly the case. Is there something inherently wrong with that? How many open source software developers would love it if instead of "please implement x feature" it ends with "...and here's $1.2 million to finance the development of it" at the end? End users get new features they may actually use, massive OSS gets funding. Win-win for all parties.
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Probably not evil, just incompetent. Many internet multiplayer games today place trust in the client in order to grant a smoother experience on higher latency internet connections, which makes it easier to implement cheating mechanisms. The fight against this is all about verifying the client and the environment it is running in. WINE is quite hackable, so one can see why they'd want to blacklist the platform outrigh…
>Probably not evil, just incompetent. Incompetent, or rational decision in terms of bang-for-buck to reduce cheats?
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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 ta…
"I would just analyze the HDMI output from my computer (via an FPGA)" "(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.)"
What does it * mean?
Where did map reduce come from?
I HATE FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING EVANGELISM!
"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."
"dumb cheaters" are the ones who don't want to spend 1000 hrs and hundreds of dollars on a fucking learning algorithm running on an FPGA reading from your fucking HDMI output! Like WTF! That HDMI output is outputting at a bitrate of something like 1080 * 1920 * 60 * 256 * 3 = 11GB/s of data.
I probably made a math mistake, but on the order of magnitude of 10GB/s which you have to fucking neural net down to a cursor position ON DEDICATED FPGA HARDWARE.
All those challenges are before you get to making your results look like a real player.
Note: after re-reading this more times than I would like to I realized he doesn't necessarily propose using a ML solution for identifying targets, so maybe some of those criticisms are unfair.
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Me too, but I suspect at worst it would be like "and make sure to develop and refine the export to UE4 functionality," which is something the community benefits from anyway.
Let's pretend that's explicitly the case. Is there something inherently wrong with that? How many open source software developers would love it if instead of "please implement x feature" it ends with "...and here's $1.2 million to finance the development of it" at the end? End users get new features they may actually use, massive OSS gets funding. Win-win for all parties.
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I have the same setup as you, except rather than use Maya for animation I use the free UE4Tools plugin for Blender which works with 2.79. I had pretty good success with it, and wrote a Python addon which builds on top to retarget mocap data from the Perception Neuron suit to the UE4 Skeleton.
I've got one of those suits and would love to give your Python code a try with UE4, if it's available somewhere.
https://github.com/dmo9000/blender-addons
You need to enable the addon as per usual along with UE4 Tools, and then once you have a model loaded and parented to the UE4 rig, and an Axis Neuron animation imported, it should be fairly easy to use. There is a "Bake Animation" control in there somewhere that should bake the animation out to an animation strip. I think you have to specify the name of the source rig (ie. the raw skeleton data imported from Axis Neuron), and there are buttons to enable/disable transferring finger/foot data as well.
I haven't used it in a couple of years however, so if it doesn't work feel free to hit me up with questions. It was just a quick hack, very rough and ready. No warranty :-)
Also any patches which improve the accuracy of the retargeting (hands can still be a problem in general) are very welcome!
This quick test clip I did the weekend I wrote it demonstrates the current quality of the retargeting, although it is rendered in Blender and not UE4:
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I agree that steam's existence has done wonders for gaming, and I'm also happy with their work on linux gaming (and never mind some cheap sale games) But that doesn't mean that steam today is the best experience for gaming, and I would probably go so far as to argue that their hold on gaming is harmful to the industry, the largest issue imo being their large take of sales.
I disagree with pretty much everything you've said. Steam is the best experience for PC gaming I know of. It provides discovery tools, cloud saves, forums, reviews, gifting, a shopping cart (Epic still doesn't have one), and is just as happy to promote Nobody Studio's latest interactive visual novel as it is BigCo's annual AAA Call of World of Battlefield. Their "large" take is pretty standard for an online storefron…
If you're buying the game to play with someone, you buy it on whatever platform the other person has it on.
Otherwise, you look at whatever platform you spend the most time on. If it's available there and the price is "reasonable" for you, then you buy it there. End of story. I don't believe that most people actively search out a new platform.
Otherwise, if it's not available or you think you can get it for lower cost elsewhere, then you go to the next store you think is likely to have it or have it cheaper.
Given that framework, it doesn't really matter how good a platform is for a consumer outside of being able to buy a certain game. The main factors for that platform are:
1. How many people are on it. and 2. How wide the selection on the platform is.
So I would argue that not only does the platform compete for users on 1 (which I've argued is mostly based on 2 and pricing), but also for developers on 2. I think steam's behavior with their features is mostly oriented towards making the platform attractive to developers, and Epic is offering exclusives and $$$ to draw developers in.
As to whether Epic's exclusives are good for that gaming community, you can argue that they will allow for an ecosystem of epic subsidized developers, and lead to more competition from steam for holding developers.
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What matters is if the accepting of the money outweighs the good of turning it down. It's not always an easy equation.
But that money is going to exist whether you accept it or not. You not accepting the money doesn't mean the way it was acquired stops happening.
But by accepting the donation you may be signaling that you're ok with how the donor made their money. By turning it down, you may also have a PR opportunity to spread a positive message.
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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 ta…
This is actually a major component of bot use for f2p games. A lot of companies try really hard to prevent anything that looks like playing in virtual envs. Having these bots fill up your games and play terribly is a bad look for any game that depends on multi-player interactions to keep people involved.
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Blender supports FBX exports so you can bring models from there to unreal, but Maya is the much more popular program with artists for modelling and rigging, there's a whole lot going on with these programs so I doubt its any one thing, if it were close i'm sure a lot of people would be happy to not pay for Maya considering how expensive it is.
> Maya is the much more popular program with artists for modelling and rigging This is the circular reasoning I'm trying to avoid. I'm not looking for any one thing either, I'm looking for any shortcomings OP can think of. I've used Blender+Unreal for a number of years and Blender itself for over fifteen years so I could rattle off issues I've dealt with in integrating Blender into the pipeline, but many have been de…
Some examples: If you already know that `Tab` switches between object mode and edit mode, then it's quick and easy. If you don't, then you have to click the drop down mode selection menu, which is one of the dozens of widgets on screen with highly variable levels of usefulness (seriously, what the hell is 'Grease Pencil'?). And if you hover for a tooltip, it doesn't even tell you that tab is the shortcut!
Or when in the UV workspace, there's literally nothing in the interface window except the vertices/edges. How do I select all vertices? How do I select multiple via box? How do I do numeric input? None of this is obvious.
The defaults are also terrible - eg click to set 3D cursor, instead of select.
Overall, Blender seems to suffer from a classic case of open-source programmer driven development. If you already know how to use it, it's very powerful and customizable - the python scripting is great! But because no one really cares about making it into a product, the UI/UX suffers.
I haven't used Maya/3DSMax, but I have used Fusion 360 (another Autodesk 3D modelling package, but focused on CAD/CAM) extensively, and it is much, much more user friendly. There are easily navigable menus which surface key functionality and respond contextually to the workload - ie if you're modeling, creating components and performing extrusions/rotations is front and center. If you're sketching, applying constraints (and the various types available) is all right there.
Of course, none of this means you CAN'T use Blender with UE, you totally can. And if you're a Blender expert, then none of this probably bothers you, because you don't care about discoverability of functionality since you already know it all. But if you're fresh out of Digipen or whatever, and you have to learn a single software package, then the refined products from Autodesk are going to win.
edit: In fairness, I hear that 2.80 is going to fix a lot of this, and I'm looking forward to trying it.