Oh god. Please aim higher than that. Not saying that Blender ain’t powerful, because it clearly is, but it’s UI is just plain shit. (Unless there have been some massive improvements over the last few years.)
I might have to one of these days, but man do I doubt it’s UI is usable after being such hot garbage over so many years. Such a shame too because fuck everything about Autodesk and I know Blender has some incredibly powerful tools.
Blender used to be basically unusable for me, the UI made no sense and attempting to use it after learning 3d through maya and 3ds it just didn’t work. Then they made it good, I spent a few weeks learning it a few years ago and it’s great now. What you’re describing is exactly what they went and did
So you’re not gonna try it like everyone is telling you to. I have no idea what they’re talking about because I don’t use blender but uh…me thinks you should try it instead of being stubborn and not. Seems kinda dumb.
Blender 2.79 and earlier was super-unintuitive. 2.8 gave it a fresh coat of paint it’s easier and more featureful with each version (Now 3.6, 2.8 was years ago!)
I know right! I keep wishing all software would adopt some of it’s amazing features, like hover copy-pasting, being able to right-click any button/option to set a custom keyboard shortcut for it, being able to type maths into any numerical field, etc.
I tried learning it some time ago (months, not years) and I never cussed so much in my life… maybe I’ll just get the hang of it eventually, but let’s just say, first impression on the UI is not good.
Being intimidated and lost is completely normal given that it looks like this, and there’s probably not a single person on the world to have ever used all of Blender’s features.
Watch the whole Blender 2.8 fundamentals playlist, things get way easier once you know what to ignore and what UI conventions blender uses as well have a rough overview of the feature set – because that allows you to ignore even more stuff. Then figure out what you want to do, figure out a workflow, customise the UI to make that particular thing convenient (remapping a couple of keys when you need something often, leave other things you need twice a day in the menus, etc), and bob’s your uncle.
Last, but not least: Unless you come from another 3d program and absolutely can’t be bothered to re-train your muscle memory use right-click select. Your index finger is going to thank you, it’s also a better UI convention in general as it leads to way fewer misclicks (selecting instead of manipulating or the other way around). Personally, I use space bar for the context menu (the default is play video which I rarely use, and if then shift+space isn’t exactly awkward). There’s also plenty of extensions focussed on particular workflows, e.g. F2 is very common if you do mesh editing, I also use machin3tools, especially for mode switching.
All major general-purpose 3d packages have a feature set so large that it can’t possibly fit onto keybindings, and you can’t pick them up like picking up a word processor. At the same time it’s professional software used by professionals who want to be fast and efficient, so the optimal UI isn’t “intuitive” (as in: dumbed down) but flexible and customisable. Blender’s defaults aren’t bad for some basic work but ultimately you will find them lacking, that’s not because the defaults are bad but because they are a compromise between 10000 ways to use the program. Ask three blender users how they use blender and you’ll get fifteen answers.
I wish GIMP had a full UI redesign like Blender, it could work as a Photoshop replacement for many use cases but… Jesus it’s non intuitive, flawed and it mixes opposing design principles all the time.
There was a project that renamed it to a less controversial name and updated the UI to more closely resemble modern photo manipulation tools, but they’ve stopped working on it before a major release.
EDIT: There’s PhotoGIMP by Diolinux, a Brazilian Linux YouTube channel with a really nice host. This is a set of plugins and configuration files that try to ease the transition from Photoshop to GIMP for newcomers. It’s certainly good, but as an add-on, it can’t actually fix all issues with GIMP.
Seriously just let GIMP finally die. At this point the whole branding has become a running joke with anyone who works in graphic design. Better start a new project that hasn’t that much negative baggage.
Are there other open source projects near feature parity with GIMP, though?
There are certainly other commercial software, like Affinity, and certainly some shady Photoshop clones like Photopea (and it does work really well) but nothing like GIMP, as far as I’m aware.
No sadly not. Krita is great for digital artists but otherwise not a good gimp replacement. I personally still have my Affinity Photo 2 copy that I bought on Windows and use it in a VM. But I have the feeling that even huge parts of the Linux community have given up on GIMP. A lot of people that I talked too rather use Photopea instead. That’s why I think investing in GIMP is pointless. It has been seen as a joke for almost two decades, that the branding will never undo the negative connection. That’s why I think people should start a new project and if they have a clear vision and appear competent, rise a crowdfunding campaign in the FOSS movement.
It’s been my understanding that the general populace has been asking the developers of GIMP for years now to overhaul the UI and make it much friendlier to use, and the answer came back, “No, stop asking.”
Gimp’s problem is not so much the UI, but that it has fallen way behind Photoshop in terms of features. Fixing up the UI wouldn’t hurt, but you’d still be stuck with a graphics app that’s 20 years behind the competition. It would need a heck of a lot more work to catch up.
You’re thinking of Glimpse o believe. And yes gimp really needs a change. Krita isn’t bad but not good for more graphic design oriented tasks. It’s type tools are awful.
My wife has a few things on YouTube she made with Godot, and she has noticed a significant increase in traffic, since Unity made their blunder.
Godot really deserves their increased popularity and donations, it’s absolutely amazing what they have achieved as a true Open Source project that is absolutely 100% free to use, and gives 100% control to game developers.
This is really exciting to see. Enshittification is generating increasing backlash against incumbent monopolies, and encouraging more movement toward sustainable open source software.
I have to imagine he has something planned (inb4 GabeN AI Overlord) for after he’s gone.
He’s a bit crazy about prepping for disaster iirc. He lives in New Zealand now and has since the Covid outbreak. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a very long document that lays out a lot of rules for if he’s gone and Steam is to continue
At that point I’ll probably too old and have lost interest in gaming anyway, so I’ll just let the next generation of gamers figure it out themselves. Kinda like boomers leaving us to deal with high property price problem because it’s no longer their concern anymore.
Yeah but just the amount of games I own on Steam already (not to mention the Steam Deck), if all that ended up getting enshittified by Microsoft it’d be like having to start over from scratch pretty much.
EGS is really the only thing remotely close to what Steam does, though.
GOG will always be an afterthought as long as they have their DRM-free policy in place. They’re super cool, but they’re a niche and will never grow beyond that without losing what makes them cool.
Origin (or whatever EA’s calling their store now) gave up pursuing third-party sales years ago. They still do it, but they clearly have no interest in actually making a go of becoming an actual competitor to Steam.
The Windows Store is terrible for a number of different reasons, even if it’s better than Microsoft’s previous attempts at getting into this space (coughGWFLcough). EGS is more likely to overtake Steam than Windows Store is to even rival EGS.
Uplay (or, again, whatever Ubisoft is calling their store these days) is like Origin - I don’t even know for sure if Ubi is doing third-party sales, but if so, it’s very much an afterthought for them.
And then everyone else just sells Steam keys. They’re not in the same market as the others, so don’t really fit into this conversation. If you’re 100% reliant on the store you’re “competing” with, you’re not competing with them.
A lot of games on Steam are DRM-free, but not (yet) on GOG. GOG isn’t an afterthought just because of their DRM-free policy, it’s also because they’re so small.
But they did allow it, unfortunately. And MS could simply argue that it already has dominance in the PC space as 96% of PC gamers are Windows users. So owning Steam is just buying 1 out of many stores (here they tout Epic, Amazon, etc).
I mean it's a bad argument but MS made a lot of bad arguments to get their way and they seemingly worked.
Activision-Blizzard-King isn’t a dominant company in any segment. You can’t say the same for steam. Regulators would have a much easier time blocking such an acquisition.
Plus, at least from my perspective, Activision-Blizzard was already bad enough that if MS made it worse, it wouldn’t affect me because they were already bad enough that I’d swore off their games. MS owning them was an improvement or at worst more of the same.
That’s absolutely not the case for Valve. They are one of the few large companies that I respect plus they are playing a big role in breaking the windows stranglehold over OSes when you like to play games.
The level of popular opposition to MS acquiring Valve would be on a whole other level than the opposition to the blizzard acquisition. It might even rival the opposition to Nvidia acquiring ARM.
The regulatory bodies hand waved actiblizzard through. Let’s not pretend anything else happened there. Microsoft can do whatever they want and no one is gonna stop them. Same as every other big company.
The only thing stopping Ms. is that valve is a privately owned company. But everyone has a price.
Yes, that is just how the American system works. The actual body here is the doj. The ftc tried to sue and was slapped back immediately. This was the ftc trying to show claws and the actual ruling body saying no, you have no power and Microsoft can do what they want.
It was a huge loss for the ftc that has been trying, and failing to fight big tech
Yeah, now I’m concerned this might happen with Unreal Engine, even though they’ve given no indication that it will. Once Godot works out the kinks with level and texture streaming, and has a landscape editor I will be going back to Godot.
When did the term “open source” start including specifics about licensing terms? My understanding from the past few decades was that “open source” meant the source was available for people to look at and compile.
Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. from Wikipedia
The same article also talks about the difference between open source and source available:
Although the OSI definition of “open-source software” is widely accepted, a small number of people and organizations use the term to refer to software where the source is available for viewing, but which may not legally be modified or redistributed. Such software is more often referred to as source-available, or as shared source, a term coined by Microsoft in 2001
Under that strict definition, software under the GNU GPL would not be “open source” because the license stays with the code, and is not truly “for any purpose,” which is the same deal with the Epic license: you may use, study, change, and distribute the Unreal source code, but it stays under Epic’s license.
If you are talking about the FREEDOM to fork and publish and share and whatever, then you mean Free software.
You are not allowed to distribute unreal source. From their FAQ:
Unreal Engine licensees are permitted to post engine code snippets (up to 30 lines) in a public forum, but only for the purpose of discussing the content of the snippet
But the code is easily visible and you can compile it yourself. If you say “I only run software I 100% knows what it does because I can read it’s source code” then Unreal Engine fits, it’s open source.
they want it to be open source so that they can’t do a unity
That has nothing to do with open source, that has to to with licensing, which I’m pretty sure isn’t an issue anyway since I think Unreal versions are tied to specific license versions, i.e. if you download the engine under one term, thats the only one you have to use
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code,[1] design documents,[2] or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration.
Generally, open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for use or modification from its original design.
Unreal Engine is technically open source, because it’s source code is made available to the general public. But it is licensed under a restrictive EULA instead of any of the normal licenses you’d expect for an open source project (MIT, Apache, GPL3, etc).
This is definitely pedantic, but “open source” is a colloquial term, not a technical one. Most people mean FOSS when they say open source, but the terms aren’t exactly equivalent. The license that governs the code is really the only part that actually matters.
Long-term I think corporate tech as we know it is screwed. Their explosive growth from the pandemic making everyone terminally online is drying up as more and more people go back to touching grass, so now the bill’s coming due and it’s only a matter of time now before Unreal also does something stupid we can’t even imagine for a quick buck
People were terminally online well before 2019. It exacerbated the problem but we’re not going back. I don’t really think that’s a problem, technologically it pushed us further ahead which is always a good thing.
You’re right in that we are starting to rediscover what it means to be physically social again. I think that’s a good thing, too. People that got away with shit before aren’t getting away with it any more.
The problem is that interest rates have gone up after being extremely low ever since the 2008 crash, so investors lost their endless supply of debt-fuelled free money. They can’t pump money into companies operating at a loss anymore, so suddenly those companies have to find a way to turn a profit.
And some of them realistically can’t. Every other commercial game engine is developed for the studio first; Cry, Source, Unreal etc. These engines were made for, well, Far Cry, Half-Life 2, Unreal Tournament. The studio saw returns for engine development in the sales of games, then they said “We could probably further monetize the work we’ve already done if we license the engine and SDK out to third parties.”
Unity on the other hand is trying to have the Autodesk/Adobe business model of “We have a free student or hobbyist tier, and then a commercial license that’s $100,000 per minute per seat.” The thing is, Autodesk and Adobe really don’t have realistic competitors in their market sectors. Unity very much does. Unity competes directly with GameMaker Studio, Godot, Unreal, Source 2 among others, the development of which are either directly supported by the sales of first party titles (or are outright FOSS projects in the case of Godot). So Unity has to set their prices to compete in that market, without the support of first party game sales.
ANY gaming, or even tech, company looking at possible acquisitions is interested in Valve. In the same way that everyone would be down to clown with Ryan Reynolds if he knocked on their door but we know it won’t happen.
Sensationalist media will grab at anything, really.
I mean, the Nintendo thing started with an email Phil Spencer replied to titled “random thought,” and the email was basically a lot of “Yeah that sounds great, but here’s why it’s not going to happen. But sure, though, it would be nice to own Nintendo, and I know a guy who’s been trading some of their stock if you wanted to maybe buy some.”
What, there is nothing wrong with your device… but I do not want to give you anything under warranty… Let me just put a scratch there real quick while you come back from showing me where the breakers are. feel free to watch it here in an it’s glory
Why on Earth would they make it Nvidia exclusive given how thoroughly that company has screwed the pooch on open source drivers and consequently how dominant AMD has come to be in Linux gaming?
I don’t know that we’re bitching per se, just kind of a weird choice. It’s like they went to Popeye’s and tried to order a salad, it’s just like yeah, the ingredients are technically there, but why?
Don’t Nvidia cards natively support this through gamestream? I don’t know if Amd has something similar or not but you can already easily set up something like this to stream to a steam deck
The nvidia/vulkan open source driver is apparently pretty rad. I haven’t had a chance to test it myself yet since I am running a dual gpu setup that contains one gpu that isn’t supported. The original maintainer for nouveau is apparently also working at Nvidia and contributing to the project as an Nvidia employee now too soooo maybe they are turning over a new leaf?
The point isn’t even whether the terms are acceptable anymore. They tried to change the deal retroactively because they felt they had a strong position in that game developers are already invested into their ecosystem.
They may have gone back to saner terms for now but unless the entire management structure resigns, there’s no reason not to say they won’t try again in the future.
It doesn’t even matter of their management as a whole changes. No matter who it is, what matters are their actions going forward. The only way to get out of the hole they dug themselves in is years of sitting around being good.
They tried to change the deal retroactively because they felt they had a strong position
I’m honestly surprised that I have not seen by now a meme pic of Darth Vader telling Lando that the deal is being changed, but the face of Darth Vader is instead the CEO of Unity.
I love how unity went from “we have a tech that can distinguish pirated copies with 100% accuracy, and also we exploit android and iOS sandboxing with 0-days to track reinstalls without fail, trust our numbers” to “we have no idea about the install numbers, you need to tell us”
It’s a shame. But based on what I saw about it, it looked like maybe they had some delusions about using LLMs for character dialogue, which seems like an insanely complex feature to build into an already complex game.
Why? It can’t be much more than using one of those chatbot girlfriends. I know there could be delays as it takes time to generate but it could have a local version that just is a stripped down version that just processes dialogue. Probably requires a beefy GPU though.
You’d need the conversations to be highly constrained in order to not break the game. Currently there are too many ways of “jailbreaking” LLMs. It was too much of a scope creep for a game which was already biting off a lot more than most studios could chew.
There already are a small number of games utilizing LLMs. Yes it‘s immersion breaking from time to time but the worst part is the credit system many of them use to pay for the API. If you go past your conversation limit, you‘ve got to pay extra.
Honestly, one thing I’m seeing frequently in comments about this is a bit frustrating. That is, people saying that they vow never to buy any games in Unity ever again on principle.
Vendor lock-in is a real thing, and part of the reason they actually tried this play. Many of these developers likely want to switch to a different engine, but don’t have the time or resources to do so. Honestly of all people hit by this situation, they probably need the help most.
Incidentally, if you are one of those devs reading this and feel you don’t know anything other than Unity, go learn something else. Diversify your portfolio. Learning a new engine isn’t hard if you know the fundamentals.
Unity dev here. Will switch on our next game, but don't have the choice for the current game that we've already invested 4 years into.
Also, bevy looks nice code-wise but it desparately needs a proper editor and GUI to make it artist friendly
Hopefully Unity doesn’t disrupt your current project too much.
But yeah, I think this is the most extreme case of a company burning trust with their users overnight in recent years (worse than Twitter IMO). It’s especially bad because many Unity users/devs have their livelihood depending on Unity, so of course they are going to change once they get a chance. The risks of not switching now massively outweigh the risks of switching.
It will just take a lot of devs/teams some time to transition. Unity will probably go under in 2-4 years, they can’t recover from this.
I’ve played around with Godot a bit, and in my view it actually makes more sense than Unity. Probably has more limitations, but hopefully those can be overcome in the next couple of years.
Thanks. We're fortunately still on 2022, so it won't really affect us at this point.
I've been keeping an eye on godot for a while, it seems like a very interesting engine. I'm not sure if it's ready for prime time for the scale and rendering quality we're usually looking for, but it might be a great option for 2D and smaller-scale projects.
There is the blender_bevy_toolkit which aims to serve Blender as an editor for Bevy. I haven’t tried it myself, but definitely will when I get to more artistic phases of my projects.
That looks like an interesting project, but it seems it hasn't been updated in over a year, and is only compatible with bevy 0.6. The current version is 0.11 or something. I've had my ass kicked before by relying on projects that didn't have a lot of support available, so I would stay out of this one.
That’s a valid point. Games released in the next 2-3 years should be probably be given a pass. My admittedly layman’s perspective is that any indie game deep enough into development that switching engines isn’t feasible most likely wouldn’t require another 4 years to ship.
That’s true for sure, but that doesn’t mean that it’s valve didn’t do an absolute fuckload of work to get proton to be actually functional.
Getting direct3d and vulkan working with actually useful performance was the turning point for Wine being useful for games in addition to just standard applications.
They definitely spent an ass-load of money on that and the fact that Wine was around for 25 years before that just goes to show that no one else was willing to do that.
the fact that Wine was around for 25 years before that just goes to show that no one else was willing to do that.
Remember that Wine is built by community of volunteers (afaik, tell me if I’m wrong), and they don’t have as much resources as company worth billions USD.
A lot of the development for Proton has also been community-based. Aside from whatever Steam has done to directly improve Proton, just creating the Steam Deck, and SteamOS has brought so much more attention and focus to improving it to an extent that probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise. It gave people a reason to volunteer their time to improve it.
Getting direct3d and vulkan working with actually useful performance
They definitely spent an ass-load of money on that
[citation needed]
I’m not aware of Valve or Doitsujin ever revealing how much they paid him to make DXVK. I assume they paid him reasonably well, but I doubt it was an ass-load.
the fact that Wine was around for 25 years before that just goes to show that no one else was willing to do that.
Or maybe that Wine was a lot more work than the direct3d-to-vulkan shim that was done mainly by one person (now two people).
Valve definitely helped by funding a few key projects, and packaging them in Steam made them convenient to use, but I think exaggerating their role unfairly diminishes the much larger body of work (done by other people) that makes it possible at all.
direct3d Direct3D 11 and Direct3D12, to be precise. Direct3D9 was working fine before - and there even was native driver support for it in Mesa, that could be used together with a patched WINE.
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