This comes right on the heels of the announcement of the Blender 2.80 release candidate, hopefully upgrading to stable by the end of the month. I've been using Blender 2.80 for a few months now,...
This comes right on the heels of the announcement of the Blender 2.80 release candidate, hopefully upgrading to stable by the end of the month. I've been using Blender 2.80 for a few months now, and I'm incredibly impressed with how far they've gone in such a short time.
If you were on the fence about learning Blender due to its historically unintuitive interface, give 2.80 a try. Lots of things have changed, and it's much more approachable now.
How much relearning does it require from previous versions? I've just started learning Blender in the past week and I'm wondering if that'll be a hurdle soon. EDIT: Trying it out now. This is much...
How much relearning does it require from previous versions? I've just started learning Blender in the past week and I'm wondering if that'll be a hurdle soon.
EDIT: Trying it out now. This is much more intuitive for noobs like me, I'm impressed! It's no longer a bunch of tools buried in menus or mapped to bizarre hotkeys with 0 discoverability. I can find things and play around, which is great since I have a hard time learning software in the formal way that Blender seemed t require. I'm sure there's a limit to that, but it seems like everything else will open up now that there's less stumbling around just to select things and move around the right way. It'll be hard to move over from the tutorials I'm using since it's so different from before, but this is worth it. Thanks for mentioning this, I had no idea it was an option.
There are lots and lots of changes. Personally, for anyone just starting out, I would strongly recommend using 2.80 right now. 2.79 will be the legacy option in just a few weeks, and while you can...
There are lots and lots of changes. Personally, for anyone just starting out, I would strongly recommend using 2.80 right now. 2.79 will be the legacy option in just a few weeks, and while you can transition from 2.79 to 2.80 without too much fuss, why not start learning it now?
(In the past, 2.80 was super unstable, but it's rock-solid for me now. As always, YMMV.)
Im unsure as to why epic (well... tencent) would do this. To look good? Do they use blender in their development and want to see it improved? I like blender, its amazing software and its free...
Im unsure as to why epic (well... tencent) would do this. To look good? Do they use blender in their development and want to see it improved?
I like blender, its amazing software and its free (libre). But I really dont like epic / tencent and their business practises. Its... conflicting and im looking for what epic stands to gain from this but im unsure, which is unsettling. Epic arent the sort of people I would trust to not act maliciously.
Epic using Blender instead of Maya 3D is going to save them money is probably why they did it. My takeaway is that companies are rarely black and white and more so shades of grey. Examples : Apple...
Epic using Blender instead of Maya 3D is going to save them money is probably why they did it.
My takeaway is that companies are rarely black and white and more so shades of grey.
Examples :
Apple :
Good : Work on webkit, Safari's tracking protections, their general stance on privacy
Bad : Terrible repair policies, (generally) overpriced products, very restrictive operating systems
Epic Games :
Good : Sponsoring of Blender, Sponsoring of Lutris.net, EasyAntiCheat on Linux (Work to make it work in Proton)
Bad : Exclusivity tactics, bad privacy policies, poor store program
Mildly tangential, but is it just me or are Epic's "bad" items like an order of magnitude worse than Apple's? Poor repair policies are the only thing I'd really say is "bad". For price, Apple can...
Mildly tangential, but is it just me or are Epic's "bad" items like an order of magnitude worse than Apple's? Poor repair policies are the only thing I'd really say is "bad".
For price, Apple can price their shit as expensively as they want. I don't see how that harms the consumer or anyone else. Just don't buy it if it's out of your range. And I actually don't think their products are that overpriced. For the laptops, compared to other laptops with the same form factor (i.e XPS, Zenbooks) they are a good 100-200 more. Not trivial, but not incredible either. iPhones and the other flagships are basically the same price at this point.
For something a developer, for instance, will be heavily using for the next 3 years, if you amortize the cost it's completely irrelevant. OSX is a great OS for software dev. If you're comfortable with it.
Well, it's subjective on what you think is most important and obviously, I didn't list every instance for each, I just took what I had on the top of my head. They can price however they want but...
Mildly tangential, but is it just me or are Epic's "bad" items like an order of magnitude worse than Apple's?
Well, it's subjective on what you think is most important and obviously, I didn't list every instance for each, I just took what I had on the top of my head.
For price, Apple can price their shit as expensively as they want. I don't see how that harms the consumer or anyone else. Just don't buy it if it's out of your range. And I actually don't think their products are that overpriced. For the laptops, compared to other laptops with the same form factor (i.e XPS, Zenbooks) they are a good 100-200 more. Not trivial, but not incredible either. iPhones and the other flagships are basically the same price at this point.
They can price however they want but putting out products with eye-gauging prices is not good for the consumer since well then you can't use their product, that's obviously not something good from my point of view and they can only really put those outrageous prices because they have a monopoly on their Operating system which some may like (I personally hate it). If you compare a same spec and don't factor "flagships" then usually they are outrageous, some of their products are more decently priced but for example :
MacBook Air is priced 1099$ for a 1.6GHz Dual-core i5 8th gen, it's way too expensive.
OSX is a great OS for software dev. If you're comfortable with it.
I've personally never tried MacOs development and most likely never will because spending a lot of money for a computer I'd only use for that is something I want to never support. Their development suite really needs to be on other operating systems, especially their iOS tools, it's completely outrageous to me that I'd need to pay for a computer to even build the program and then pay a license because there's no other way to distribute applications for iOS.
It's not price gouging in an elastic, luxury market. They have effectively a luxury/professional electronics brand, and they price for it. As you said; if you don't want to pay the price, there's...
It's not price gouging in an elastic, luxury market. They have effectively a luxury/professional electronics brand, and they price for it. As you said; if you don't want to pay the price, there's plenty of alternatives to go around.
If you compare a same spec and don't factor "flagships" then usually they are outrageous
Then you're not comparing the same product. A macbook pro is going to cost a fuckload more than a 10 lb gaming laptop made of plastic, for obvious reasons.
MacBook Air is priced 1099$ for a 1.6GHz Dual-core i5 8th gen, it's way too expensive.
Again, you're not comparing it within it's actual peers. Let's look at a comparative windows laptop, with the same weight and form factor. In this case, the LG Gram
If you don't need something this light and small, then don't buy it. It's not for you. Doesn't mean it's price gouging, especially when everyone else prices around the same.
I've personally never tried MacOs development and most likely never will because spending a lot of money for a computer I'd only use for that is something I want to never support.
I don't mean it that way. OSX is a Unix system, and Unix systems are king. It's not about developing apps, it's about developing anything. Linux or OSX, that's your choices. Windows is a godawful development platform. And OSX has a better (imo) user experience than the Linux desktop environments.
Most Apple products are not so horribly priced compared to the competition. iPhones don't really cost more than competing flagship smartphones. When I've looked into high-end laptops, the MacBook...
They can price however they want but putting out products with eye-gauging prices is not good for the consumer
Most Apple products are not so horribly priced compared to the competition. iPhones don't really cost more than competing flagship smartphones. When I've looked into high-end laptops, the MacBook Pros aren't the terrible value people think they are (most comparisons I see will blatantly ignore things like SSD speed, build quality, and factory screen calibration).
You've got crazy expensive stuff like their new reference monitor and Mac Pro, but these aren't products geared towards consumers at all.
My biggest beef with Apple (and the primary reason I won't buy a MacBook Pro) is the lack of upgradeability. I won't buy a premium laptop that doesn't have user-replaceable storage and memory.
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It's not Tencent. This has nothing to do with Tencent. You can't just look at who's investing in a company and automatically assign everything they do to their investor's money.
It's not Tencent. This has nothing to do with Tencent. You can't just look at who's investing in a company and automatically assign everything they do to their investor's money.
I originally mentioned Tencent because I like to mention when a company is owned by another and it may not be known. Especially because I do not like Tencent and I think they may be one of the...
I originally mentioned Tencent because I like to mention when a company is owned by another and it may not be known. Especially because I do not like Tencent and I think they may be one of the reasons that Epic handles user data poorly.
It's unlikely tencent is very hands on with epic. The way it usually works with major investors is: they put major pressure on the company for returns on the investment and the company therefore...
It's unlikely tencent is very hands on with epic. The way it usually works with major investors is: they put major pressure on the company for returns on the investment and the company therefore makes a lot of shady decisions.
With that said I don't think it's the case here either. Tencent has been investing in gaming a ton without messing with things much. They likely just want a lot of control over gaming in the west.
Since Tim Sweeney still owns an outright majority of shares in his company, no investor (or coalition of investors) is really in a position to make the company do anything Tim doesn't want. This...
Since Tim Sweeney still owns an outright majority of shares in his company, no investor (or coalition of investors) is really in a position to make the company do anything Tim doesn't want.
This means that Tencent probably isn't meddling in any of Epics business practices.
This also means that Epic's upsetting business practices (like buying EGS exclusivity mere weeks before game launches) are all on Tim's conscience.
You know more about this than me. I'm just approaching a company I don't like pouring money into something I do like with a healthy overdose of cynicism.
You know more about this than me. I'm just approaching a company I don't like pouring money into something I do like with a healthy overdose of cynicism.
Oh yeah no doubt. I heavily dislike Epic. It's just that sometimes, incentives align between "good" and "bad" entities. People often have this comic book idea of what good and evil represent, and...
Oh yeah no doubt. I heavily dislike Epic. It's just that sometimes, incentives align between "good" and "bad" entities.
People often have this comic book idea of what good and evil represent, and that an "evil" entity will always have evil motivations, and will always do evil things to further their evil motives. When the reality is, everyone's both bad and good, and "good" things can benefit bad entities too.
Epic is not "owned" by Tencent any more than Disney is owned by me. Tencent owns lots shares in Epic, but Tim Sweeney still owns a majority of the company and has complete control.
Epic is not "owned" by Tencent any more than Disney is owned by me. Tencent owns lots shares in Epic, but Tim Sweeney still owns a majority of the company and has complete control.
over on reddit some people are, unsurprisingly, taking this news pretty poorly because i guess there's no way epic can just give shit without it somehow being a deep op to violently seize control...
over on reddit some people are, unsurprisingly, taking this news pretty poorly because i guess there's no way epic can just give shit without it somehow being a deep op to violently seize control of blender or something even though blender is such high quality software that it rivals actual professional software in its field. SRD post recounting some highlights:
"I eagerly wait to find out how Epic will leverage this donation to destroy Blender."
"Ugh, now Blender is potentially compromised."
"No such thing as a no strings attached donation with Epic. This is just an attempt to influence Blender in whatever direction suits them."
"Because Epic is that big of a POS an people already have them on Steam. No one benefits from Age of Wonders being free, everyone loses from Epic trying to sway people to their launcher because if it's beneficial that will make exclusivity even more cancer than it is. What, you don't think they will pull that Microsoft did in the 360 days and make sure entire series NEVER leave their store? Epic would absolutely LOVE to do that."
"I've stopped supporting indies entirely, if Tim wants to use indies against me I'll simply refuse to support them."
"I actually hadn't considered that. Now I wonder if they're going to steal code from Blender for use in UE4."
"So basically... some time ago, Epic basically bribed Blender developers to drop the game engine, and now that it is done, Epic is merely following up on its side of the deal..."
it's even getting bad enough now that the thread in question has a counterjerk (which is still getting downvoted, of course, but still) from all the people massively overreacting. gotta love community dynamics. i anticipate that we're approaching a point on the internet with epic games news where shit completetely hits the fan because epic still does enough to be hated by people, but those people also get backlash of their own from the people who are tired of the constant complaining about epic.
Related: I posted the Epic Store Tetris Effect release deal on /r/GameDeals and in less than 10 minutes it said "12% upvoted" so it had gotten 8 or 9 downvotes immediately. It never got back above...
Related: I posted the Epic Store Tetris Effect release deal on /r/GameDeals and in less than 10 minutes it said "12% upvoted" so it had gotten 8 or 9 downvotes immediately. It never got back above 40% upvoted, even though this is a pretty good deal on a highly-anticipated release that was universally acclaimed on PS4.
People have just fallen down the reddit rage-hole and get angry about anything related to Epic now.
Oh don't get me wrong, I don't like the Epic Store either, and I comment negatively about it fairly often. It's objectively worse than Steam in almost every way, and they know that—that's why...
Oh don't get me wrong, I don't like the Epic Store either, and I comment negatively about it fairly often. It's objectively worse than Steam in almost every way, and they know that—that's why their strategy is to buy exclusives and force people to use it, because nobody would pick it over the other options if they were able to choose.
It's not a good approach to competition though, and only hurts users instead of motivating innovation. I agree that Steam could use some competition, but Epic isn't actually competing with them, they're just forcibly buying their way into the market.
But I recognize that it's business and it really doesn't matter. It's a mild inconvenience to me at worst.
The problem is that there isn't really anything Steam can do that can change the exclusivity decision being made by developers (which is because of how much Epic pays them). Like I said, Steam is...
The problem is that there isn't really anything Steam can do that can change the exclusivity decision being made by developers (which is because of how much Epic pays them). Like I said, Steam is already far, far better than the Epic Store, and making it even more better won't affect this.
For example, if the Epic Store had some kind of innovative achievement system that users loved and was causing people to favor buying games on Epic instead, Steam could improve their own achievement system, or try to come up with one that's even better than Epic's to draw people back. That's the kind of innovation-through-competition that you want to see.
But the only thing that's happening is that Epic is paying devs a lot of money to release exclusively on their store, and there's nothing Steam can do about that except... what? Pay for their own exclusives? Pay devs not to release exclusively (effectively giving money for nothing, since that should be the default)? Those aren't good changes, and don't really improve anything for the actual users of the service.
Blender is free software under the GPL so I don't understand how they think this would work. Donation or not the only way UE4 can use GPL'd code is if Epic put UE4 under the GPL.
"I actually hadn't considered that. Now I wonder if they're going to steal code from Blender for use in UE4."
Blender is free software under the GPL so I don't understand how they think this would work. Donation or not the only way UE4 can use GPL'd code is if Epic put UE4 under the GPL.
This comes right on the heels of the announcement of the Blender 2.80 release candidate, hopefully upgrading to stable by the end of the month. I've been using Blender 2.80 for a few months now, and I'm incredibly impressed with how far they've gone in such a short time.
If you were on the fence about learning Blender due to its historically unintuitive interface, give 2.80 a try. Lots of things have changed, and it's much more approachable now.
How much relearning does it require from previous versions? I've just started learning Blender in the past week and I'm wondering if that'll be a hurdle soon.
EDIT: Trying it out now. This is much more intuitive for noobs like me, I'm impressed! It's no longer a bunch of tools buried in menus or mapped to bizarre hotkeys with 0 discoverability. I can find things and play around, which is great since I have a hard time learning software in the formal way that Blender seemed t require. I'm sure there's a limit to that, but it seems like everything else will open up now that there's less stumbling around just to select things and move around the right way. It'll be hard to move over from the tutorials I'm using since it's so different from before, but this is worth it. Thanks for mentioning this, I had no idea it was an option.
There are lots and lots of changes. Personally, for anyone just starting out, I would strongly recommend using 2.80 right now. 2.79 will be the legacy option in just a few weeks, and while you can transition from 2.79 to 2.80 without too much fuss, why not start learning it now?
(In the past, 2.80 was super unstable, but it's rock-solid for me now. As always, YMMV.)
Im unsure as to why epic (well... tencent) would do this. To look good? Do they use blender in their development and want to see it improved?
I like blender, its amazing software and its free (libre). But I really dont like epic / tencent and their business practises. Its... conflicting and im looking for what epic stands to gain from this but im unsure, which is unsettling. Epic arent the sort of people I would trust to not act maliciously.
Epic using Blender instead of Maya 3D is going to save them money is probably why they did it.
My takeaway is that companies are rarely black and white and more so shades of grey.
Examples :
Apple :
Epic Games :
Mildly tangential, but is it just me or are Epic's "bad" items like an order of magnitude worse than Apple's? Poor repair policies are the only thing I'd really say is "bad".
For price, Apple can price their shit as expensively as they want. I don't see how that harms the consumer or anyone else. Just don't buy it if it's out of your range. And I actually don't think their products are that overpriced. For the laptops, compared to other laptops with the same form factor (i.e XPS, Zenbooks) they are a good 100-200 more. Not trivial, but not incredible either. iPhones and the other flagships are basically the same price at this point.
For something a developer, for instance, will be heavily using for the next 3 years, if you amortize the cost it's completely irrelevant. OSX is a great OS for software dev. If you're comfortable with it.
Well, it's subjective on what you think is most important and obviously, I didn't list every instance for each, I just took what I had on the top of my head.
They can price however they want but putting out products with eye-gauging prices is not good for the consumer since well then you can't use their product, that's obviously not something good from my point of view and they can only really put those outrageous prices because they have a monopoly on their Operating system which some may like (I personally hate it). If you compare a same spec and don't factor "flagships" then usually they are outrageous, some of their products are more decently priced but for example :
MacBook Air is priced 1099$ for a 1.6GHz Dual-core i5 8th gen, it's way too expensive.
I've personally never tried MacOs development and most likely never will because spending a lot of money for a computer I'd only use for that is something I want to never support. Their development suite really needs to be on other operating systems, especially their iOS tools, it's completely outrageous to me that I'd need to pay for a computer to even build the program and then pay a license because there's no other way to distribute applications for iOS.
Sorry for the slight rant.
It's not price gouging in an elastic, luxury market. They have effectively a luxury/professional electronics brand, and they price for it. As you said; if you don't want to pay the price, there's plenty of alternatives to go around.
Then you're not comparing the same product. A macbook pro is going to cost a fuckload more than a 10 lb gaming laptop made of plastic, for obvious reasons.
Again, you're not comparing it within it's actual peers. Let's look at a comparative windows laptop, with the same weight and form factor. In this case, the LG Gram
https://www.amazon.com/LG-Gram-Thin-Light-Laptop/dp/B078WSX4QL
It's $950 for a dual core i5.
If you don't need something this light and small, then don't buy it. It's not for you. Doesn't mean it's price gouging, especially when everyone else prices around the same.
I don't mean it that way. OSX is a Unix system, and Unix systems are king. It's not about developing apps, it's about developing anything. Linux or OSX, that's your choices. Windows is a godawful development platform. And OSX has a better (imo) user experience than the Linux desktop environments.
Most Apple products are not so horribly priced compared to the competition. iPhones don't really cost more than competing flagship smartphones. When I've looked into high-end laptops, the MacBook Pros aren't the terrible value people think they are (most comparisons I see will blatantly ignore things like SSD speed, build quality, and factory screen calibration).
You've got crazy expensive stuff like their new reference monitor and Mac Pro, but these aren't products geared towards consumers at all.
My biggest beef with Apple (and the primary reason I won't buy a MacBook Pro) is the lack of upgradeability. I won't buy a premium laptop that doesn't have user-replaceable storage and memory.
It's part of their $100M MegaGrants program, specifically under:
1.2 mil is like a drop in the Advertising bucket for a company like Tencent.
It's not Tencent. This has nothing to do with Tencent. You can't just look at who's investing in a company and automatically assign everything they do to their investor's money.
I originally mentioned Tencent because I like to mention when a company is owned by another and it may not be known. Especially because I do not like Tencent and I think they may be one of the reasons that Epic handles user data poorly.
It's unlikely tencent is very hands on with epic. The way it usually works with major investors is: they put major pressure on the company for returns on the investment and the company therefore makes a lot of shady decisions.
With that said I don't think it's the case here either. Tencent has been investing in gaming a ton without messing with things much. They likely just want a lot of control over gaming in the west.
Since Tim Sweeney still owns an outright majority of shares in his company, no investor (or coalition of investors) is really in a position to make the company do anything Tim doesn't want.
This means that Tencent probably isn't meddling in any of Epics business practices.
This also means that Epic's upsetting business practices (like buying EGS exclusivity mere weeks before game launches) are all on Tim's conscience.
You know more about this than me. I'm just approaching a company I don't like pouring money into something I do like with a healthy overdose of cynicism.
Oh yeah no doubt. I heavily dislike Epic. It's just that sometimes, incentives align between "good" and "bad" entities.
People often have this comic book idea of what good and evil represent, and that an "evil" entity will always have evil motivations, and will always do evil things to further their evil motives. When the reality is, everyone's both bad and good, and "good" things can benefit bad entities too.
Epic is not "owned" by Tencent any more than Disney is owned by me. Tencent owns lots shares in Epic, but Tim Sweeney still owns a majority of the company and has complete control.
over on reddit some people are, unsurprisingly, taking this news pretty poorly because i guess there's no way epic can just give shit without it somehow being a deep op to violently seize control of blender or something even though blender is such high quality software that it rivals actual professional software in its field. SRD post recounting some highlights:
it's even getting bad enough now that the thread in question has a counterjerk (which is still getting downvoted, of course, but still) from all the people massively overreacting. gotta love community dynamics. i anticipate that we're approaching a point on the internet with epic games news where shit completetely hits the fan because epic still does enough to be hated by people, but those people also get backlash of their own from the people who are tired of the constant complaining about epic.
Related: I posted the Epic Store Tetris Effect release deal on /r/GameDeals and in less than 10 minutes it said "12% upvoted" so it had gotten 8 or 9 downvotes immediately. It never got back above 40% upvoted, even though this is a pretty good deal on a highly-anticipated release that was universally acclaimed on PS4.
People have just fallen down the reddit rage-hole and get angry about anything related to Epic now.
Oh don't get me wrong, I don't like the Epic Store either, and I comment negatively about it fairly often. It's objectively worse than Steam in almost every way, and they know that—that's why their strategy is to buy exclusives and force people to use it, because nobody would pick it over the other options if they were able to choose.
It's not a good approach to competition though, and only hurts users instead of motivating innovation. I agree that Steam could use some competition, but Epic isn't actually competing with them, they're just forcibly buying their way into the market.
But I recognize that it's business and it really doesn't matter. It's a mild inconvenience to me at worst.
The problem is that there isn't really anything Steam can do that can change the exclusivity decision being made by developers (which is because of how much Epic pays them). Like I said, Steam is already far, far better than the Epic Store, and making it even more better won't affect this.
For example, if the Epic Store had some kind of innovative achievement system that users loved and was causing people to favor buying games on Epic instead, Steam could improve their own achievement system, or try to come up with one that's even better than Epic's to draw people back. That's the kind of innovation-through-competition that you want to see.
But the only thing that's happening is that Epic is paying devs a lot of money to release exclusively on their store, and there's nothing Steam can do about that except... what? Pay for their own exclusives? Pay devs not to release exclusively (effectively giving money for nothing, since that should be the default)? Those aren't good changes, and don't really improve anything for the actual users of the service.
Blender is free software under the GPL so I don't understand how they think this would work. Donation or not the only way UE4 can use GPL'd code is if Epic put UE4 under the GPL.