LOL... "muck about", he says, as if that is relevant.

At least Unity lets you create and publish games, and for free at that. Go ahead and "muck about" in CryEngine, get something like the basis of a game conceptualized, start building and importing assets and writing code. Let me know how relevant or useful that is when you realize you need more than $1 million USD per license for CryEngine and everything you learned "mucking about" has no bearing on development processes or standards in an engine you can actually afford to release in without being owned by a AAA-class publisher or succeeding in a record-breaking Kickstarter. There's a REASON indie devs don't use CryEngine.

Because otherwise, CryEngine has little to no bearing on developing in any other engine. How do I know this? By spending 3 years as a member of the dev team for Mechwarrior: Living Legends, as well as being a developer at my own studio, working in... you guessed it, Unity3D. After the MWLL project wound down, a group of us set out to start our own studio, and even with numerous, highly-placed contacts at CryTek, we *still* chose Unity for a reason: value, because Unity is actually affordable by us merely mortal developers without Chris Roberts-like bank accounts and industry connections and multi-million dollar Kickstarters.

I could release a game in Unity tomorrow. It might look like crap and have bugs, but I can release and publish a game in 24 hours. CryEngine? HAH, good luck with that. At best, it still won't work or look any better than my Unity game would, due mainly to the quality and quantity of art that I could produce, which the engine has nothing to do with, and the amount of code I could pump out, which CryEngine doesn't just automagically make better. If you've never *worked* with CryEngine (ala, more than just "mucking about"), you simply aren't qualified to comment about features being locked away or unavailable in Unity, much less things just working, because no matter the features CryEngine might let you "muck about" with, they're not relevant if you can't afford the engine license in the first place. Despite what the fanboys think, CryEngine is not some shining bastion of game engine perfection that can do no wrong: and it is a giant square peg that fits in a giant square hole, filling a purpose, whereas Unity is a little more like a bunch of legos - the starter kit for which is FREE - that, when assembled, fit a series of differently shaped, if generally smaller holes, and it fits them well.

I doubt anyone who has actually published a title in CryEngine AND Unity would say this is is really anything more than and apples and oranges comparison at best, as they are different engines with different strengths and weaknesses, and they fill different niches within the game development community.

Nastygram sent to custserv@games-workshop.com telling them what I think of their parsimonious self-aggrandizement.

It's one thing to know you're annoying, it's another thing when the people you count on to buy your products start flooding your inbox TELLING you you're being obnoxious.

After all, the FCC says that a complaint from one person is the equivalent of 50,000 people (or somesuch ridiculous figure) who are just as upset but didn't or couldn't send a complaint, right? In any event, I'll not be buying their products until they can stop acting like greedy little children who think they own everything they can lay hands on or claim to, and I'll be encouraging others to do the same.

Indeed! What's not to LOVE about the idea of building a multi-billion dollar piece of scientific equipment whose scale qualifies it for one of the most mammoth--yet still delicate--engineering projects in human history, which depends critically on the entire thing staying in one piece (usually built below-ground) and in perfect alignment...

in one of the most seismologically active countries on the planet.

Brilliant!

No... there's a lighthouse in the middle of Prussia. A white house in a, Red Square.

I'm living in films for the sake of Russia, a kino runner for the DDR, and the 52 daughters of the Revolution turn gold to chrome.

But seriously, lyrics to old goth songs notwithstanding... I know a lot of my fellow Americans are naive about a lot of things, but comparing our media, bad as it is, to China or Russia's, much less to North Korea's, of all places, is at best naive in the extreme, and a good sign someone has been drinking kool-aid they shouldn't be.

Do what I do for my textures, and embed a "watermark" of your signature or something similar deep into the final image where it can't / won't be seen by anybody who doesn't know where or what to look for, in multiple places where the pixels are conducive to such masquerading. It's almost a form of steganography, where the message to be sent is a verification of the authors' identity and claims of original work.

I do mine in such a way that even if I leave one such image that can be readily seen, there are at least a half dozen more than cannot be found without a side-by-side comparison of source and production images with and without the "watermarks" (impossible without someone getting hold of my .PSD's). Keep the true "source" .psd for yourself, create another for disbursing to students that contains several "watermarks" with an extreme level of transparency well-blended into many or all of the layers so they'll have an example .psd to "reverse engineer", and then separately give them the actual un-watermarked original source images, which they should then be expected to chuse to assemble the final image themselves. You might even put an entirely separate watermark into the source images, so you can check to see which watermarks the submitted image has, as opposed to checking only for the source mark.

If they put in enough time and effort to actually successfully circumvent this technique by finding and either eliminating or duplicating all the various marks, then they've probably got the requisite skills to pass the original challenge... at least if you do it the way I do.

My "signature" is in at least 3 places in this image, buried deep in different layers with heavy transparency masks, and it would have to be altered drastically to be guaranteed to remove all traces of it.

Programmers and other I.T. professionals shun unions for one major reason: they are illogical, and make no sense, with no real purpose, value or function in a modern society with strong civil rights and a functioning legal system that will enforce the relevant laws that prevent the worst abuses and excesses. No one in the U.S. is compelled to work anywhere they do not want to, and all are free to leave their jobs for better ones, or to simply choose not to work for a bad one. The consequences of that action is purely their own, but you're still free to make the choice and determine that the pay is not worth the hardship. For us, already saddled with excess requirements, inefficient bureaucracies, non-IT literate management or corporate leadership, and everything else, this would just be intentionally putting more roadblocks and inefficiencies in the way of the very people whose job it is to leverage technology to make people more efficient, and Q.E.D., unions make no sense.

I'll be damned if I'm going to put myself in a position where I have to call someone at a union before I'm allowed to open up my PC or server case to add some more RAM, or before I can comment in some code, lest I inspire someone else's wrath or ire because I'm "threatening their job" by doing something that the union says only one person can do.

No one with the basic logic and reasoning skills necessary to pursue a successful career in computing--or any other scientific endeavor--who is not also blinded by some philosophical, religious or political propaganda could possibly perform an analysis of unions, both modern and historic, and come to the conclusion that they would be of any real benefit to themselves or their industry. Unions are just like licensing and regulation schemes that serve only as a form of protectionism from healthy competition in a free market, as well as protection from their own negligence and failure, making it difficult or outright impossible to hold them responsible for their own actions. Unions are in no way necessary to "protect workers' rights", as that is what the law is for, and what the law does,no to mention our system of political representation, whose job it is to change or introduce legislation that protects citizens. Add on top the modern advantages of educatoin for all who want it (and even for those who don't), and instantaneous communications / mass media, and the kinds of gross abuses that necessitated the rise of the first modern unions in the 30's are functionally impossible for a company to get away with these days: even Foxconn, in China of all places, finds itself unable to get away with such abuses unnoticed, yet it is exactly this kind of forced socialism that defines labor unions where such abuse becomes more possible. Let's also not forget that modern labor unions are almost indistinguishable from medieval European "Guilds" that were so reviled by the end of their time, and whose demise was in no small part responsible for the rise of modern industrialism.

Unions--membership in which, in states that support them, is generally compulsory... if you want to work, that is--have no place, benefit, or value in free market capitalism and a free and liberty-loving society. In the 30's and 40's, maybe, but those days are long since gone, and this is a different country today than it was then. They help no one but themselves, and too often are determined to be the parasite that kills the host. I simply cannot see how anyone with the capacity to work in computing for living could come to a different conclusion after an honest examination of the facts.

Oh, and in reply to Animats above... there's nothing there that shows that union as being of any tangible benefit to society at large, much less the field of animation, in a free society where people can choose their own employment at will: the guild outlived those other studios for one reason and one reason alone: political protectionism and activism. No one at EA was forced to work there: they could have chosen to work for a better company, chosen to educate themselves more to be qualified for a better job, or could have chosen another career field/opportunity. Everyone in the industry knows EA sucks to work for: Q.E.D., anyone working there knew what they were getting into, and thus either determined for themselves that the benefits outweighed the negatives (career potential from gained experience, etc.), or some other factor that made it worth it to subject themselves to such conditions. In any event, they all still retained the choice to find another job, if in another field, or to negotiate something better.

Indeed, you are correct: my only claim in this regard was that it is the most often made request by backers, and this remains true with Star Citizen as well.

As a CryEngine developer myself, with several close contacts in both art and code at CryTek, well... let's just say that while I think it could be done, I'm not holding my breath either for a native *nix port of Star Citizen. That doesn't change the fact that no developer these days working on a new engine has any excuse for choosing DirectX over OpenGL.

There is no good reason not to develop on OpenGL, especially if you only have resources to develop for or the other, since OpenGL runs on anything, but DirectX restricts you specifically to Win* systems.

Major studios, however, can't seem to see the writing on the wall, much less read it, which is why indie studios and crowd-funding projects are taking the industry by storm, as witnessed with the recent campaigns for Planetary Annihilation, Project Eternity and the still-in-progress Star Citizen. On all of these projects (and many others besides), the number one request by backers or potential backers has consistently been for Linux and Mac support.

Add to that the fact that from the very beginning of the Humble Bundle program, Linux users have consistently donated more for their games (and significantly so) than Windows and Mac users, and there can be no question that just because they use a free OS, Linux users are more than willing to pay for games they can play natively, and developing for it is just a good idea all around: better performance, wider market, less licensing hassle... what's to lose?

If you're a *nix user of any skill or experience and running Ubuntu who is genuinely concerned about performance and stability, you should probably be running Debian anyway and pointing to the Ubuntu repos for anything that might be missing or too old for your liking.

News flash: Warren Buffet unsustainable, irrelevant.

Not news: No one cares what he thinks, and no one cares about his news services and the combination of drivel, pablum and feces they spew.

150 some posts, and not one mention (from any of them with a score of 2 or higher) mentioned gas-discharge tubes?? Surge protectors will not protect from lightning. No consumer-grade UPS on the market will survive or actually protect from a full-on lightning strike, nor will most consumer-grade "whole-house" systems. The best thing you're likely to find that will ACTUALLY do the job requested is a gas-discharge tube.

Correct. I would never pay EA or the like a single dime more for a game than I have to, and I usually give them what they ask for only grudgingly. OTOH, I have "overpaid" anywhere from 50% - 100% for every one of the 5 Humble Bundles I have purchased, not only willingly, but happily. A little goodwill earned by treating the customer not just well, but better than you have to, will go a long way in not only earning repeat business, but in the customer overlooking when you occasionally get things wrong, or being willing to patronize your business even when they may not need to.

Gravity is a harsh mistress.

It's also worth noting that you're talking about nuclear weapons. It can be used to make "dirty" bombs, however.

Virgin sturgeon, at that.