In the US, Census data is used for redistricting purposes, which CAN influence election outcomes in the future - so the implications of a census may be wider than you think. I don't know exactly the way it works in Australia, but some googling has led me to believe they use a system that is similar.
Another major problem with the census was the Australian Bureau of Statistics holding onto the data and changing their privacy policies which meant that in an act of protest a ton of people entered false information or ommitted details. A really poor census overall.
Absolutely, I didn't mean to downplay the importance of a national census. It is just that the results are used for longer term project planning and policy making, so the effects aren't as immediate as a whole government inadvertently being kicked out or brought into power as a result of an election day debacle.
Many companies in the games industry have settled on using Perforce or SVN (or more recently Plastic DVCS) internally as, out of the box, it can handle both code and non-code assets (i.e. large binary files) well in tandem. Git has problems with the latter - people have tried to correct this with solutions like git-annex and git-LFS but these have failed to catch on thus far.
The problem with non-code assets in git is (or at least it was for us) not with such assets being large blobs with weird in-git storage model, but with such assets being _unmergeable_ in case of two parallel edits of the same object.
Since merges are not generally possible (except for some special usecases), one would expect version-control system's help in avoiding parallel edit situation at all. This is where svn's centralized server helps, allowing "pessimistic locking" of certain files and folders.
AFAIK, Plastic also offers such a feature, when git cannot do anything like that by design.
> The problem with non-code assets in git is (or at least it was for us) not with such assets being large blobs with weird in-git storage model, but with such assets being _unmergeable_ in case of two parallel edits of the same object.
I tried storing large images in git once. And one problem was when git would try to do garbage collection every now and then. And start diffing all the images against each other to repack them to use less space. This was very CPU and memory intensive.
I was wondering about this as well. I haven't done much video game dev in the past few years but even in my little indie stuff trying to check files into Git was a bit rough at times. Doable but on a very small scale. I'm surprised Git hasn't been adapted to handle this more natively but I'm curious if there are any trends or directions people are heading in regarding this or if they're still sticking with SVN.
True and as if perforce didn't have enough of a strangle hold on the industry, it's free for small studios under 20 users I believe. So that would include most indie developers.
Hi greggman, not enough for what? Do you mean usability? gitlab, github and bitbucket provide a GUI to git-LFS. Or do you mean not enough documentation or a technical limitation like maximum file size or check-in/out speed or just bugs?
On the other hand, it seems like it makes you wait until you're trying to do a git push before you find out somebody else has it locked already - which seems a bit cruel. The more traditional approach is for the file to be read-only in your working copy, and you use the version control client program to make it writeable (and it then performs the appropriate checks). So if you omit to consult the client program first, you'll get no further than your first attempt to save before you find out.
You need to know it's locked when you open it. Which means you need plugins for popular software. Photoshop, Maya, Unity, 3DSMax, Blender, etc.
P4 has many of these integrations so that artist and other non-technical people will know the moment they open the file that if they want to edit it they need to check it out. Similarly they can choose to check in the changes directly from their asset editing app, not from some separate app. They also need an easy way to find out who has it checked out so they can go over to that person and ask when they'll be able to edit it or if the person forgot to check in their changes.
I've written some in the past as well (http://mayasvn.sourceforge.net/) that would not just check in a Maya file but also check in all the referenced files (otherwise an artist checks in the asset but there are lots of missing textures).
On a subnote: Asking the artist "check this in?" on each save is a bad UX. I tried that and the artists complained since they save all the time (in case their app crashes).
Kind of - it depends on the artist you talk to. OpenSubdiv utilities have been part of the major 3D packages for about a year or two now, and it's true that they can offer some significant speedup, well-needed in both the games and per-rendered CGI industries where high-poly subd models can easily go up to several million triangles.
Besides the speedup, there is a very interesting feature of OpenSubdiv - local edge creasing. To influence the general creasing or smoothing of a subd mesh, an artist usually has to add more or subtract geometry in an area, respectively - whereas OpenSubdiv gives you the alternative option to assign a crease value to an area of the source mesh which influences the apparent creasing of the resultant mesh in that area without the artist having to add more geo. It works some of the time: not every artist likes using local edge creases but for those that do, it can be a very big help, considering the the occasional difficulty in adding new geometry to a mesh that flows correctly and doesn't accidentally ruin the rest of the mesh.
This really doesn't tell me anything about Unity, especially in respect to other solutions.
- Unity is only for games
Who said they were? You can find lots of examples of game engines being used for other applications, such as in Archviz, non-game simulation areas, interactive art, etc.
- You can only do small games with Unity
Again, who said this? If an engine is free and well supported you might find a lot of smaller games on it, but that's not indicative of the engine as a whole. If you're planning on making a large game, the question you'd be asking is not whether you can make a larger game in Unity, but whether it's appropriate for your larger game in particular.
- Unity is worse than Unreal Engine
Now that's a opinion if I've ever heard of one. Also, you don't need to use C++ to use Unreal. UE4 natively supports Blueprint scripting out of the box (I wouldn't recommend making a game completely in a visual programming language to begin with, anyway). Support for interacting with Unreal through other languages (JavaScript, Nim, etc.) has shown significant progress in the community.
- You don’t need programming knowledge to use Unity
Many of the popular free engines nowadays have some form of visual programming feature. You'd be severely hurting yourself trying to accomplish a bigger problem using visual languages only, however.
- All Unity games looks the same
Some gamers enormously conflate a game's art with its engine, which is completely wrong. Bad art will look bad in any environment - any developer would know that.
- Unity has a lot of bugs
That's an incredibly vague statement that you can apply to just about any large software project, not even just game engines.
http://implbits.com/products/hashtab/ - Shell extension that adds a panel in the file properties window that can compute and compare a hash against many different hash functions
http://mactype.net/ - Shell extension that gives various options to modify Windows' anti-aliasing scheme. Useful if you're not a fan of TrueType's look. Can cause noticeable lag and drawing issues on some less powerful systems, though
http://cmder.net/ - Alternative, more-featured terminal emulator for windows (works with both Cmd/PowerShell)
Cool stuff, but unfortunately Intel has really delayed AVX512 instructions for their main consumer processors (ffs, it was supposed to hit on Skylake). It looks like we have another die shrink to go after Kaby Lake before we get that sweet ultra-wide SIMD:
I'm surprised people don't really think about this in the opposite direction - that programming can be used to help understand math better. How many people have gotten along better with linear algebra and calculus by virtue of messing around in a game engine? Having to actually apply math knowledge to solving problems - some applicable context - works wonders for cementing and fertilizing that knowledge.
Many a student thinks to themselves in a math class: "Man, I'll never use this." When you actually need the math, suddenly you have this "oh shit" moment and you step into gear.
I'd argue that their Surface line seems to be going on quite well - in fact, its been inspiring a lot of copycats itself (e.g. Elite X2, Asus Transformer Book, IdeaPad Miix)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistribution_(Australia)