pouët.net

Use of UE et cetera

category: general [glöplog]
Quote:
doing an asset loader is a trivial exercise in futility. You lose (potentially a lot of) time and gain zero new knowledge doing it.


so as someone who's never written any 3d or rendering related code implementing an asset loader will not teach me anything about topology and 3d rendering concepts, right, it's been quite the wile I came a cross such a bs statement.
added on the 2018-08-05 22:03:07 by LJ LJ
@numtek can't you see, you're not gaining any knowledge from that because somebody else already did it! \s
added on the 2018-08-05 22:05:30 by LJ LJ
let's say "I'd lose a lot of time and gain zero new knowledge doing it." :^) your mileage may vary.

if you know how something works, replicating it just for the sake of every character being written by yourself might not be the best use of your time. if you're doing something to learn more about it, go ahead. that's an excellent idea.
added on the 2018-08-05 22:07:32 by msqrt msqrt
Ah. Well I agree on that one obviously yeah.
added on the 2018-08-05 22:14:10 by numtek numtek
(though an asset loader is a bad example of that, you'll learn the concepts when you get to rendering that model anyway)
added on the 2018-08-05 22:14:14 by msqrt msqrt
Implementing an asset loader will teach you at least about the file format you're loading, and the host application you're exporting from, and the intricacies of the format specification and the overall school of thought behind that format. If manually copying characters from one document to another you're not writing code, you're ripping it.
added on the 2018-08-05 22:27:47 by LJ LJ
Intricacies that don't matter at all for the rendering. It's a data pipeline that just happens to have some specification. Do you also write your own jpegs and pngs loaders?
added on the 2018-08-05 22:36:27 by msqrt msqrt
Sigh.

Everyone is talking about commercial engines like an asset loader you otherwise would implement over a weekend would be the biggest pull for designers, and not the months of slaving over the UX / UI.

People don't pay for Notch because it can load an FBX into a vertex buffer and make a drawcall on it, or because there's a chromatic aberration feature in it somewhere. They pay for it because the compositing, the spline editor, the resource management, the parameter adjustment, the stability, the ease of use, etc... are all exposed as a commercially viable UX similar to what other visual FX tools were doing for decades now. Everyone can be motivated to write a radial blur, but not many coders in the scene are willing to spend weeks writing a timeline control, and designers at this stage seem to expect nothing less, which to me feels a bit sad, given how not so long ago having your own scripting language to be able to give to a non-coder was considered a major step ahead.

The problem isn't that Notch or UE or whatever exists and provides artists turnaround time and less reliance on a "coder", it's that these tools went so far ahead that we drowned in convenience, and now there's no cooperative middleground between when a coder produces a demo and when an artist produces a demo; that's probably also a contributing reason why 4k intros are so popular because the "coders" (in practice it's closer to technical artists, really) can make them themselves without having to rely on an artist.
added on the 2018-08-05 22:45:10 by Gargaj Gargaj
I usually don't load jpegs or pngs but only my own texture format.
That being said you'd still learn a lot from implementing your own jpeg loader(about wavelet compression e.g.) or png loader, not necessarily about rendering but still.
added on the 2018-08-05 22:45:11 by LJ LJ
Well back in the days I did yeah :) It was the only way of loading jpgs right?
I felt awesome when I saw the pixels magicly appearing in my demo. It felt like I had dicovered a shortcut to an infinite world of content. But yeah anno 2018 writing one is a rather trival exercise.
added on the 2018-08-05 22:46:41 by numtek numtek
I think credits in the demo is the solution because we all seem to be upset when someone outside the scene borrows without credit. (Get Lucky, etc blah blah.) This leads directly to the next thought.

If we don't mind uncredited code, then why should coders be the only ones saving time? Why couldn't a graphics artist or someone who puts graphics in a demo buy an artwork or 3D model, or outsource it to India?

And what if we love a musician so much that we make a demo in homage and use his .mp3? I mean, it's just a disco/prog rock/synth tune, tons of them done before, why reinvent the wheel?


Both have obviously been done, and has been appreciated on Pouet.

I actually believe 100% that anything goes. "Orgas will admit, sceners will vote accordingly." - although out of party releases are absolutely fine and then there are no rules, just sorting into a category.

Now, obviously if acceptance grows, this means the scene changes, and there's an arms race. Everything is compared to those who get an engine and any resources they want. Then there will be a battle between those who can save the most time by buying the most impressive wheels, and they will be production machines and will build a big reputation in the scene.

And of course those who don't "keep up" will then be viewed as elitist, grumpy, or pretentious old gits. Those sceners will not be able to build a big reputation in such a scene, since their prods will not be appreciated and therefore not upvoted.

In other words, "it could happen to PC too", or something. Lol! ;)
added on the 2018-08-05 22:49:59 by Photon Photon
Good point Gargaj, one that I hadn't really considered. I was more occupied with the "why don't the coders want to dig into all that juicy stuff and code rendering of shadows and depth of field etc. etc."?
But doing comples UI stuff, yuck, that sounds a lot like "work" - yeah I can totally understand why you are looking at premade solutions if that is what is expected!
added on the 2018-08-05 22:53:01 by Sdw Sdw
Gargaj, right you are. I brought the asset loader example up mostly because it's something I'd be fine with people loading with a library even though they "code everything themselves", since I don't think it's a related or an interesting problem.

And I know how the compression in jpeg works but I'll never implement it because any sane OS has a built-in library for that.
added on the 2018-08-05 22:54:18 by msqrt msqrt
Quote:
Why couldn't a graphics artist or someone who puts graphics in a demo buy an artwork or 3D model, or outsource it to India? And what if we love a musician so much that we make a demo in homage and use his .mp3? I mean, it's just a disco/prog rock/synth tune, tons of them done before, why reinvent the wheel?

You literally described sample CDs and Turbosquid.
added on the 2018-08-05 22:57:44 by Gargaj Gargaj
And people use both all. the. time. The fact that someone considers this objectionable or are surprised by it is frankly shocking.
added on the 2018-08-05 23:26:42 by gloom gloom
Quote:
doing an asset loader is a trivial exercise in futility. You lose (potentially a lot of) time and gain zero new knowledge doing it.


I rack a rather fat paycheck coding core technology, pardon me, exercising futility ;)


So can we all like, start to reason from a broader perspective? I fear not. This post was sponsored by Watcom C and Turbo Assembler, took me a while to get from prompt to post gents.
added on the 2018-08-05 23:32:32 by superplek superplek
If a PC demo is a piece of Art and nothing else, not caring about how it was made, and what ingredients were used; if computing power and file size are unlimited, guys let's go for pre-rendered videos. Why should we still care about real-time?
Real-time shows the ability of coder&artists to deal with constraints. If we want no constraints, fuck real-time.
added on the 2018-08-05 23:35:26 by Soundy Soundy
Quote:
Why couldn't a graphics artist or someone who puts graphics in a demo buy an artwork or 3D model, or outsource it to India?


Wait, what, artists, musicians and the likes make every single muxel (you see what I did here) fully, 100%, themselves, all the time?

BB Image

Not our fault! :D
added on the 2018-08-05 23:41:54 by superplek superplek
Quote:
doing an asset loader is a trivial exercise in futility. You lose (potentially a lot of) time and gain zero new knowledge doing it.

so as someone who's never written any 3d or rendering related code implementing an asset loader will not teach me anything about topology and 3d rendering concepts, right, it's been quite the wile I came a cross such a bs statement.


LJ, i'm sorry but it's not a bs statement, it's just that you are talking to yourself.
People saying that engines are OK not because they consider DIY stuff being useless, it's because sometimes you don't want taking shit for not wanting to redo something you've done YOURSELF 10 times before and you clearly realize why you don't do it 11th time and compete with bunch of pro guys doing it on their day job. Toolset making is boring, that's it.
added on the 2018-08-05 23:46:32 by ton ton
the number of comments and justifications here just proves that there is a real problem here :)

demos made with demo construction kit were a shame to the demoscene some decades ago, i think it’s still the same today, if you can’t code, you can’t do a demo. perhaps you think you did a demo, but it’s not, you just showed someone else code in different way. but it’s still not your work :)

and yes i know if i’m not ok with the current state of demo competition i can do 4k or 64k or go oldskool, oh wait I did both.
added on the 2018-08-05 23:54:25 by rez rez
Quote:
Real-time shows the ability of coder&artists to deal with constraints

The fact that you don’t seem to regard real-time rendering as a constraint in and of itself is very telling.
added on the 2018-08-05 23:54:26 by gloom gloom
this discussion (which has already been done before over the previous years) is very reminiscent of the hard coded vs demotool demo discussion of the previous decade. for me either you hard code, use a demotool, or a premade engine, if you make sth cool with it i'm fine (like the orange demo). of course i'll respect you a little bit more if you coded and made all this by yourself but i don't really have a problem if you used a premade engine and made sth cool it as well. also why should a 3d artist need to learn how to code to produce 3d content?
added on the 2018-08-05 23:54:48 by Defiance Defiance
Quote:
you just showed someone else code in different way


That can be said for about 99% of the marching shaders today.
added on the 2018-08-06 00:05:23 by superplek superplek
Quote:
demos made with demo construction kit were a shame to the demoscene some decades ago, i think it’s still the same today, if you can’t code, you can’t do a demo. perhaps you think you did a demo, but it’s not, you just showed someone else code in different way. but it’s still not your work :)

and yes i know if i’m not ok with the current state of demo competition i can do 4k or 64k or go oldskool, oh wait I did both.

Whose synth did you use again?
added on the 2018-08-06 00:07:40 by Gargaj Gargaj
Busted.
added on the 2018-08-06 00:12:02 by fizzer fizzer

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