UE's just dropped the sub and gone free (with the 5% royalties thing): https://www.unrealengine.com/what-is-unreal-engine-4

Yup, current and all future it seems. Epic fully transitioned to the service/marketplace-holder role.

In other news, GLNext rebranded as Vulkan - http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/03/khronos-unveils-vulkan-opengl-built-for-modern-systems/

Mantle probably shuffled off for AMD specific use (? probably dead in a couple years) and Vulkan steps up as DX12's direct competitor. Preview stage only, so probably a good year or two off largescale commercial usage/industry uptake given Khronos group's speed, especially given that they plan to continue opengl dev in parallel.

Well, as long as Mantle stayed AMD-only, it was never going to get a huge amount of takeup, so while it was obviously a good idea to create a thoroughly modern API for multithreading, performance and low-level access, it served its purpose - lit a fire under the DX team to get DX12 out and competitive, paved the way for GLNext/Vulkan by proof of concept/production with BF4/DICE, the lessons learnt in its production has been rolled into Vulkan and generalised out (where possible) to be vendor/platform agnostic. (Wouldn't be surprised if some of the actual codebase from Mantle is finding it's way into Vulkan - DICE/repi very active in Khronos group AFAIK).

The really interesting thing now is that Vulkan is created to be completely platform agnostic - so if truly has lost all the cruft and shite that's built up in opengl over the years, and they don't completely screw the pooch, it could be a serious competitor for DX12, because of the cross platform support. Possibility being Vulkan takes lead dev for game engines, cross-port/maintain subset of functionality for DX - rather than what seems to be pretty popular these days of DX being primary (for ease of use on PC builds and toolchain) in the hardware abstraction layer with PS4 and opengl being branched off of that. So it's a fairly big prong in the Valve et al attack on the dominancy of windows/MS for PC gaming - much bigger prong than Mantle ever amounted to.

Also, nope, I've not seen any raspberry pi stuff - given the hardware, I would have thought it was really low level access straight from the off?

LazyGunn is all over this shizzle. A bitmap is kinda just a byte array, you can encode whatever you want, however you want.

Why?

It's like muzzy said, a bitmap is just a data structure, how you want to pack information into it is up to you but it can be pretty arbitrary. I dont know what stanbdards or buffers you're looking at but a usual written-to-screen raster is a data structure with 4 channels (arbitrarily rgba but can be xyzw or whatever you want to conceptualise it as) with each channel having a set number of bits - standard is 32bit on most gpus but i have no idea how the Pi works, might be smaller. You can pack as much data as can fit into each channel of the data structure and it's just handy that graphics devices are specifically tailored for this structure. If you're expressing pure image data i can link you to stuff regarding encoding 3 channels into 2, which could mean 6 channels of colour data into a 4 channel buffer.

The benefit of OpenCL is of course the parallelisation and it's only going to be fast if you can parallelize your algorithms, again working on each member of a bitmap array (or pixel or whatever) in parallel can make that data structure work but again, you can conceptualise your data structures how you like, within the memory bandwidth limitations of your device

If you want literature on how to help parallelize your code, i have a decent few bits and pieces iirc

Source 2 going free, will also have Vulkan support to some extent: https://steamdb.info/blog/source2-announcement/

You going to jump ship from Unity gunn? Is it still the best option for the indie dev?

I'm pretty much rooted in Unity tbh, it would have to be pretty remarkable to pull me away, esp cause of what chump just mentioned which transforms it as a very strong prospect indeed - not to mention all the community guys and working relationships ive build with devs over the years, principally asset devs, which is why im fairly clued in on asset store development and some of the stuff i'm involved in is really exciting, like the renderer Jove which is the only 3rd party renderer for Unity being made, all the stuff you'd want is integrated, it performs great, lacks some major features still but has some brilliant features in there, dx11 based, for pure performance, quality and integrated workflow it's where  its at - this kind of thing is really missing from every other game dev environment and it's why Unity is so strong despite the pedigree of others

I'm just wanting to get some core stuff together for prospective asset store development then any good dev tools made should do really well when VR hits and everyone and their dog wants to make cool alternate realities to live in/share/sell

Holy shit, Polycount still exists. Mild blast from my past.

Liking those masonryballs.

djchump wrote:

Saw this and thunk of you Gunn http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=2259324

that is great stuff, i can never contend with productions of quality like that, does sometimes feel like a different world

Depends what you want to do really.
Software is more advanced and will have more tools to speed up and aid in what you are doing, but the principles remain the same. Games can handle more detail which can require more advanced techniques.

Then there is Zbrush. Which can be used as part of a workflow to compliment more traditional methods or as a stand alone tool. It is more akin to real life clay sculpting.

I'd say zbrush was downright fun (with a few frustrating moments) and amazingly powerful now so thats a great way to get into the groove, but it should be supplemented by a more traditional 'hub' if you intend to actually do anything with the model. I use max cause its what i know, but i'd prob send newcomers in the direction of something like Modo - although for free software, Blender is amazing these days. There are tens of ancilliary applications you can get the hang of, and have to, if youre going to do something 'technical' where things like topology for animation, good uvws, generating supporting textures (essential for games now) and wotnot, i use between 10 and 20 diff applications in my workflow, but i'd say there are some essentials, photoshop being one

In short though - software is amazing these days and makes modelling very enthusing, when i started with Max, around 15 years ago, it was a nightmare for many things

begone foul sculptris

Basically, Z-Brush was the market leader, until one Norwegian dude started asking questions, skulked off, and made his own project.
Sculptris.

For a short amount of time, Pixelogic started losing sales to him, so they brought him out, and now, any version of Z-Brush that you buy, is essentially Sculptris with a better UI, warranty and support.

I don't really fucks with Z-Brush, and didn't really feel Sculptris when it dropped about 4/5 years ago, but it is what it is.

Interestingly, the dude who wrote the software left Pixelogic not all that long ago...