The Gaming Den

I spent over an hour trying to open a binary (exe) file for a program in vista that was .rar'ed; I ended up having to use an other computer that still had XP on it to get the app working.

Linux.

A sign for a 'Ma & Pa' computer shop in a nearby town says "Cheap Laptops, No Vista" among other things.

You have to turn UAC off, otherwise you can't do anything. .rar in particular is a storage format that is not accessed direct by the OS in any case, so you need to download a program like winrar to open it. A computer which still has XP on it probably had such a program loaded onto it a damn long time ago.

But yeah, Vista sucks monkey nuts.

-Username17

Yeah.. rar needs 3rd party tools, always has, always will.

I'm not sure vista is so bad, UAC is exactly like administrator access in linux, its just that the paradigm on windows has always been 'run everything as Admin' and its taking a while to get over that.

That and driver support is only now just getting there.

And the hardware companies have always been shit at writing drivers, just now vista punishes you (the consumer) for having bad drivers.

SunTzuWarmaster wrote:Linux.

You find me a way to run 3D Studio Max on Linux and maybe I'll do that.

Hell, you find a way to run that software on a Mac, and I'll even smile.

There is literally no choice when it comes to using Max, it's windows or you can't use it, and we're pretty much only using max in my program. Maya is available, but there's little point learning more than one app at a time, you're better off learning one app really well, then simply learning how to do all of the tasks your used to in an other application.

Frank, I looked up wiki on how to toggle it, and did so. Thanks.

Run Maya instead.

3DS Max is old, lame, and never was good.

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:Run Maya instead.

3DS Max is old, lame, and never was good.

-Crissa

Ruffles.

1. We use Max in the program that I'm in. You really don't have a choice in the app that you use. A friend is at Durham using Maya, but that's all that they use. However, we have Maya machines and we'll probably use it if we're getting into cinematic stuff in post-grad.

2. Max can do modelling things that Maya can't hope to accomplish, ever. It's a long standing joke. Right now, we're learning modelling, not cinematic animation. Maya wasn't actually a modelling program when it was released, they had to use an other app bundled into Maya to even allow modelling.

3. Max is also the industry standard for the world's gaming industry. Maya is for movies. I'm personally not interested in making movies.

4. The whole "X App" is better argument is completely for noobs. The three standards for apps are:

1. 3DS Max [seriously, it's the largest and most used. This program turns a profit in terms of sales. It's been traded back and forth and is now owned by Autodesk, the guys that make Autocad.
2. Maya a lot less used in the world. Mostly used for cinematic stuff. South Park uses Maya, which is like using a nuke to kill an aphid. (Never made any money b/c it was a piece of overpriced software; most companies that use it now were once given a free copy in order to whet their appetite. They're Toronto-based, so Toronto is a Maya city)
3. Softimage (wasn't turning enough profit, now owned by Autodesk)
4. Everything else, is used, but no where as many copies

Seriously, the apps are all equally lame, and never generate enough cash to turn serious profits, but they're always going to be needed since there's no point in making a be-all end-all 3D imaging application. Plus even the biggest moneysink apps that are still around have done some awesome things in terms of digital imaging/animation.

So is Vista.

I think by 'industry standard' you mean 'used by a tiny force of workers because their marketeers think so'.

Of games, maybe ten years ago, 3DS was used for the majority.

Now it's the minority. In every industry it competes in.

Ask the company that sells it. Guess what? They also sell the competition.

-Crissa

By industry standard I mean: "used by more than half of all game development studios in the world". And that's what Max is, it's used by more than half of all game developers. Maya takes up a good chunk of what's left; less than 10% of all others will use some 3rd app.

Which is what it often comes down to, what app your current development studio uses.

Heck, there was a guy who did all of his post grad stuff in Maya; his first contract was, surprise, surprise, Houdini (node based modelling, it's interesting and I did a short workshop on it at a different college). Which goes to show, that even if you know the big 2, studios can curve-ball you with lesser known apps.

Some studios even go half Max, half Maya, to make sure that they can get both apps usuable in-house.

As for competition. It's not. You should have heard the whining and bitching and moaning that Maya fanboys and fangirls had. It was all "onoooooes! Autodesk will kill Maya, b/c it ownes Max alreedy."

Except it wasn't. If anything, Maya benefitted hugely, mostly by now being able to legally add tools that Max had had as propietary for years. Max benefitted in the same way.

They're different packages for different purposes. Max is better for modelling and rigging, Maya is better for cinematic animation. Our program is more focused on modelling and rigging, while we learn animation both in 2d and 3d. The animating takes much more time (somewhere around 9 years or so) to learn, so they try to make us really good modellers at first.

As for "of the majority" of games, it's still in Max. Autodesk's own website doesn't even give a proper result for maya customer showcase games

While the same search for Max gave this.

Aside from Resistance: Fall of Man, there aren't that many games that Maya has been used for recently.

[edit:]
Wait, Autdesk lists 2 newish games on their site as devloped with Maya, the rest of the list is made up of films.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/in ... ID=7679643

Max simply has its own section for games, there's about 15 major studios listed there.

Ubisoft, Mythic, Digital Extremes, Bioware, Silicon Knights, Creative Assembly, Funcom, Epic Games, High Moon Games, Volition, NCSoft and Shanda Interactive.

Then there's the Asian market. China is almost exclusively Max and Autodesk doesn't need to have one of its apps competing in already farmed territory.

When you speak about "every industry" you seem to be forgetting the Architechture layout market. It's not huge, but it's there, and it's an industry, I guess you were only talking games/tv/animation/movies, not every industry that has digital imaging. Maya hardly touches that, while Max has about an 80% share of the world's market for that.

Really, you're just sounding like a fangirl for Maya. Which is fine, it's a really fexible and user-modable piece of software.

Some other people prefer Max b/c they want to not have to worry about coding in MEL script or setting up their interface from a nearly blank setup when they first get it.

The difference is your approach to how you solve modelling and animating problems. One fits better than the other. Sometimes one of the two is much better or even your only choice, because neither app can do everything that the other can.

I think that's one of the better things that we're learning at this school, an appreciation for using multiple apps to solve different problems.

No, no, and no.

I can't detail from here how you're wrong, but you're terribly wrong.

Maya can add tools because anyone can write them. 3DS supposed weird specular designs because someone made them for it. And Max has nothing left of a foothold in architecture or manufacture anymore. (The competition there isn't Maya, however.)

But no, 3DS is used by a minority of development. Heck, 3d tools are used by a minority of development houses.

You're very wrong about Maya, and seriously wrong about 3DS. Autodesk is looking to kill it. You're training into obsolescence. And if you knew Autodesk's history, you'd know why.

But then again, you're developing on Vista. Bribes go a long way in a capital industry.

-Crissa

Yeah. Autodesk is going to kill Max, the same way they're going to kill Softimage or any other app that they've bought. AD just wants as wide a piece of the pie as possible; they already have the biggest part of the CG pie, everything other than Autocad is just gravy.

Really, looking at Autodesk's suite of apps is like looking at Hasbro and it's toys.

All of WoTC materials sold per annum is chump change to Hasbro and not a big part of their total sales figures, in the same way that Softimage, Max, Maya and other less well known apps that Autodesk has bought is to Autodesk's sales.

Hell, Autodesk has been buying the competing CAD apps that they can for years and not killing them, because there's still a market for them.

A detailed list would be nice though, I'd like to see why and how Max is going to be killed, because you're sounding like the people who said the same thing about Maya when Autodesk bought that piece of non-profiting software.

The only way you could kill one of these apps is if there's an actual replacement. It's seriously easier in terms of effort and immensely cheaper to just keep the Max, Maya, Softimage, etc. R&D teams developing those apps; and cross pollinating abilites between them, than it is to build a new app from the ground up that incorporates every single feature of all of the apps that they currently own.

Mostly because there's probably not a single person that knows all of the things that you could do with Max, or Maya. Hell, people working in either for over a decade with either of the two will admit that they don't know things outside of their specialty. They'll also admit that both apps are good for different things.

Anyway, I'm probably more inclined to listen to people who've won the latest Siggraph award for Autodesk Mastery than people who don't talk with Autodesk employees.

Really it comes down to the fact that someone who's a recognized expert says that hating one over the other is as dumb as loving one over the other. It's a pretty balanced point of view coming from a guy who gets as angry about poor modelling, rigging and workflow as Frank does about game design and balance; so I'm able to buy it.

A sign for a 'Ma & Pa' computer shop in a nearby town says "Cheap Laptops, No Vista" among other things.

Seeing as it is strongly recommended to have at least 2 gigs of RAM to run Vista, and seeing that the cheaper versions of Vista scrimp on wireless networking support- which is likely one of the primary things you want on a low-end lappy, Vista is very much NOT a good fit for cheap laptops.

But as to the original issue, I've run into the exact same issue in linux Linky {ok}

Josh_Kablack wrote:

A sign for a 'Ma & Pa' computer shop in a nearby town says "Cheap Laptops, No Vista" among other things.

But as to the original issue, I've run into the exact same issue in linux Linky {ok}

It's weird many of the latest ubuntu versions didn't have unrar on them either. I don't know about 8.10 but several before just didn't come with them on the final release.

I run Komix which is a comic book viewer that views rar & zip & tar files under different file extensions (CBR, cbz, and CBT respectively) and each of the prior releases would have me go through the process of installing unrar before the programs would work.

The problem with both Linux and Vista is poor 3rd party support.

WinXP has great support. Eventually Vista will get great support too once the ecosystem has been flushed of hardware developed before Vista's release.

Not sure linux will ever get to WinXP's position market wise, in the foreseeable technology horizon for this stuff, call it 5-10 years.

Shitty support is definately part of that

Disclaimer: I can write, compile and load kernal modules. I cannot get a USB wireless dongle from a major manufacturer to work under Ubuntu.

Josh_Kablack wrote: But as to the original issue, I've run into the exact same issue in linux Linky {ok}

Well, it's in line with what my friend learning Maya on Macs says:

"Mac. Crash different."

Especially when it comes to anything graphics or 3D oriented. You can crash once or twice an hour, or go several days without your app or your computer crashing. Mostly based on what you're doing with your file.

Also forget about ever owning the Computer + Monitor all-in-one package that Mac vends. Those p.o.s. have a 100% total failure rate due to overheating.

Really, J_E?

That's interesting. I have one, and I manage another five dozen (donated) for a non-profit.

None of them have failed due to overheating. Ever. And I have a first gen Intelcore on my desktop that I run Maya, WoW, Second Life on (before last year's version I could run these at the same time with no loss of performance)...

They don't overheat because they produce less heat than the standard PC monitor - mostly because they don't use as much power. They also use a chimney heat-exhaust system which Apple patented in 1999 'cause apparently, no one had thought of using it for chips before. And regular fans, which can get quite loud if there's a threat of overheat, tho I've only ever heard them while doing two things: Running WoW+Maya or running an embedded upgrade).

Don't be an ass and make shit up. Search google for iMac+overheat and you'll find some worries about a model that hasn't been sold for three years and was only sold for a year, at that.

-Crissa

I didn't say all macs had a 100% fail rate. I said that the ones that include monitor and system hardware did. I'm not making that shit up, I didn't believe it either, I'm just repeating what I heard from one of the heads of the program told me when we were talking about the maya labs.

At our school, we killed every single one of those things in whatever digital imaging, video editing or 3D modelling/animation computer labs they were in.

Which I could believe, given how some of the students here have a rep for building really detailed objects running into the high 800k polys and PS documents that take up several hundred megs of space. Even a computer with the best hardware you can get will quit when it's thrown enough calculations to make at once.

Our school now has those tower-style powermacs (or w/e their called) for our maya/adobe labs. Those don't cook themselves. We do however crash those, just the same as we crash the quad core PCs that run max.

Really, you can crash any system if you give it enough push, and the imacs (if that's what the monitor/sytem combo things are called, Apple seriously has so many different systems all with unique but similar names, which makes confusion easy) aren't designed to be graphic, 3D or video crunching machines; they were meant to be the most awesome looking desktop money could buy. I'm guessing that my school got a deal, or someone wanted to buy the awesome looking imacs, or something.

I'm also guessing that the fact that Max and Maya approach fundamental things like say... rigging in their own completely unique ways (max: anything can be a bone, you can make/delete/link bones on the fly; maya: seperate bone system, you can't screw up as easily, but you have to start from scratch if you decide to change your model at all) is why you've dropped that argument.

I never make shit up. Usually when I'm wrong it's for other reasons, but making shit up is not one of them. Also, I'm not an ass. I'm a bastard.

Don't repeat rumors. Makes you look stupid.

Really.

And yeah, Max does some things different. But ya know? You can copy paste anything you want in Maya, so what does it matter if you want a new bone? Wait, bones are a mathematical representation AND SHOULDN'T BE PART OF THE DAMN SKIN.

No computer is uncrashable. But Macs are far more resilient. *shrug*

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:Don't repeat rumors. Makes you look stupid.

Really.

And yeah, Max does some things different. But ya know? You can copy paste anything you want in Maya, so what does it matter if you want a new bone? Wait, bones are a mathematical representation AND SHOULDN'T BE PART OF THE DAMN SKIN.

No computer is uncrashable. But Macs are far more resilient. *shrug*

-Crissa

Why shouldn't a bone be something wierd, like a ... actually, I don't know, rigging is seriously beyond me. I've had instructors sit with me and go over the notes that I took of their lesson on rigging, and done the lesson, and had them sit with me and rebuild my rigs, and then wierd stuff happens.

I spent over two months "trying" to rig a humanoid last year with lots of help. I skinned the same character perfectly over the course of a weekend and I hadn't really been shown how to do it.

I'm guessing that skinning is ridiculously easy compared to rigging. At least it was once I stopped using the stupid and innaccurate "weight brush" tool. I found that just selecting my mesh vertices let me get the character mesh to be weighed exactly as I wanted to without having to screw around with it over and over.

and yeah, Macs, when used for what most people would ever use a computer for (games, spreadsheets, writing documents, web browsing), are ridiculously hard to screw up.

Seriously, most people should just own macs, largely because macs are so moron-safe. Trouble is that they're pricey, and most people are both wasteful of money for stupid shit (eating out, unwearable clothing, chocolate milk, kitsch, new cars) and then don't spend money on things that would save them a lot of frustration (eating home cooked food that isn't going to slowly kill you over the next 10-20 years, buying clothing that will last and be a wearable choice at least this year, soy or at least white milk, not garbage, cars that aren't meant to fail after X miles).

Judging__Eagle wrote:<SNIP>


Seriously, most people should just own macs, largely because macs are so moron-safe.

Meh, My wife calls me a moron quite often but I have definitely not been very impressed with Macs in the last month or so.

We have a loaner Mac laptop. It's one of the old powerpc models. can't remember the name of it. We have it running OS X and I've gone through several faqs and guides for variant software on the mac and I've tried several. As far as I can tell, the Mac just tries very hard to be counter-intuitive. Of course, the last statement is a laugh because I've always been a user of linux and it's very "intuitive" OSes.

By no means am I a fanboy for any of the three standard OS (wrapping up the several linux shells in one) choices but Macs have definitely gone to the bottom of my list currently. I don't use the Mac for anything but generic use. And it doesn't real color me impressed.

Yes, how horrible, that you've been using a computer that hasn't been sold for prolly five years.

I'm sure if you were using a PC five years old it would be sterling.

-Crissa

Don't repeat rumors. Makes you look stupid.

Honestly, having people rant at me about how I should get a Mac or whatever just pisses me off. It's not even vaguely sensible.

Macs cost a lot of money. They come in pretty colors. That's really all I need to know about them for my purposes.

-Username17

Crissa wrote:Yes, how horrible, that you've been using a computer that hasn't been sold for prolly five years.

I'm sure if you were using a PC five years old it would be sterling.

-Crissa

... Maybe I wasn't very clear. I feel the software approach on the Mac is quite counterintuitive compared to the other softwares available on the other OSes. I also did state that this was a laugh as I do use the most notoriously counter-intuitive OS group on the market (Linux and many variants). Linux isn't made for creature comfort. Macs and Win OSes are touted as comfortable and easy-to-use softwares (including the softwares that work on them). I found the Mac and the various software available to be rather retarded for this purpose as it didn't accomplish that very purpose.



Capische?

That you have some unstated difficulty with the ... Some unstated aspect of the Mac OS (unknown version) you used; the GUI by which Windows was based upon; and have no ability to point out a single flaw (which probably would be laughed at) that you had trouble with... yeah, okay.

Comprendo.

-Crissa