game devs you really hate!

[hessi]

ok, let's get another discussion running! today is my 3rd day with c++ and i took a look into the maya API to get a hang of how things work. as an early simple project i wanted to write a simple SMD file exporter - no animations, just statics. after my first 3 days i completed a simple exporter that does what it was meant to do. the plugin is written for the Mac version of maya, but since i only used the ANSI and maya API it should be ported onto windows easily.

what does this have to with game devs and how they piss you off? well in my case: A LOT!

i got a new computer last summer. good stuff like quadcore, 4GB ram and so on. when you read 4GB ram everybody should now: ok so it has to be 64bit system. that's right. i used windows xp x64 for about a year and the driver support was horrible. so my new hope was windows vista since it is much wider distributed. sadly i had to notice that the new window system of vista fucks up maya 7.0. maya 8.5 works great on vista, but why the fuck is there no working exporter for SMD files avaible in maya 8? valve made a plugin for maya 7 and didnt even announce it. prall made some improved mel script exporter that was working great with maya 7 but since it was based on mel, it was sloe and finally didnt work well with complex file names and paths etc. now since the episode 2 update came avaible valve decided to fuck the tools up even more: they moved all binaries to sourcesdk/bin/ep1/bin. WHAT THE SHIT DID THAT MEAN? why is there no universal vtex.exe or studiomdl.exe? why should i care about that when there is a selection box in the sdk for selecting a game? so now the MEL scripts are not working. every user would have to change the mel code each time he wants to export between ep1 and ep2 based games.

i fucking cant believe it, how bad valve screwed the tools. the situation was bad already, but their behaviour didnt help at all. valve seems to ignore all rules of usability. they should spend some more time with developers and less time with jerking around with "new fancy web 2.0" stuff.

for me this has one consequence: no more levels, mods, models or anything else for this engine before the workflow is not working appropriately. and to be honest: if it isnt me, writing a new plugin, then there will be no plug in at all. this brings me to rage too: WHY DIDNT VALVE RELEASE THE GOD DAMN CODE FOR THE EXPORTER? people could recompile it for the newer API versions or make some changes so it works with the fucked up EP1/EP2 mess.

i am so mad right now. everything brings my piss to a boil! :ssj:

[aevirex]

Might be worth trying

[dux]

Vista is god awful. I bought it with high hopes and within 12 days it was refusing to work so I quickly installed xp 64 before I went insane from frustration.

[⌐■_■]

i know this is unoriginal but MS sucks cocks but since it has market monoply and buys out/ destroys every small company with other good ideas, we all have to put up with MS.

[Pampers]

email valve

[Algor]

May I recommend...

[Fletch]

1999: OMG! Worldcraft crashes all the time. Valve has shitty tool support!

2000: OMG! Compile tools suck. I'm using Zoners instead. Fuck valve!

2003: OMG! Hammer is such a memory wasting hog! Valve hates modders!

2004: OMG! These are the texture import tools! Does valve hate us?!

etc etc etc

[Fletch]

P.S. Algor needs to join his studio's TF2 team.

[Erratic]

Worldcraft was so much better pre-OpenGL support, for reals.

[KungFuSquirrel]

Maybe Valve doesn't use Maya 8?

Epic's support of the ActorX plugin they created for Maya only goes so far as the most recent version they use, which is notably out of date. Beyond that, licensees are stuck to their own devices. Licensees who are paying 7-digit figures to use that toolset. There's no instant flip-a-switch-and-have-a-plugin solution for new software packages and development studios are typically resistant to upgrading to them due to cost and workflow impacts. A significant advantage of the general mod community is the available time to do this sort of thing yourself - see Zoner's tools for HL over the stock tools that Valve never bothered updating. Even if it would only take 1 day for someone at Valve to write an exporter that took you 3 as you were learning, if they don't use that toolset or have other more pressing issues it's not worth their time to do it.

Public tools post-release are lucky to get life support at-best. :\

Also I second Fletch re: Algor.

[Seldoon182]

Email Arkane Studio. They are a Source engine liscence owner and I know that some of their modelers use Maya... I can't mind that VALVe doesn't care about them !

[hessi]

Email Arkane Studio. They are a Source engine liscence owner and I know that some of their modelers use Maya... I can't mind that VALVe doesn't care about them !

actually they were faster than i would be be

i understand the argument that a developers doesnt change his tools when he is working with a running system, but since source is an engine that is distributed for many other projects and other developers, wouldnt it make sense to provide up to date exporters? since probably there will be some restriction that forces a developer to use newer maya versions (such as in my case windows vista, which is of course worth another discussion).

[-HP-]

i fucking cant believe it, how bad valve screwed the tools. the situation was bad already, but their behaviour didnt help at all. valve seems to ignore all rules of usability. they should spend some more time with developers and less time with jerking around with "new fancy web 2.0" stuff.

That's what I've been saying all along, Valve's games was never user friendly for modders, I don't know how come this is one of the most used engine in the worldwide modding community! The pipeline, the exporters and compilers, everything is very annoying and confusing, even the editor is outdated, they should definitely invest one or two of the MANY million dollars they have, on the modding tools!

[robert.briscoe]

I have to say, I was in two minds about responding to this thread, but I think I need to speak out also about Valve's increasingly poor support for it's mod and mapping community.

Now I have always had firm respect for Valve and there games, and more so on how they first founded their company on the mod-maker community and how they embraced the mod community with the release of half-life. However, over time, it seems that their interest in the modding community has continued to decline since the release of Half-Life 2. The initial release of the SDK was pretty ok I guess, at least as far as hammer and the compiler tools went (I never experienced other stuff until later on -eg. faceposer) it was relatively stable and it had a huge community following passed on from HL/TF/CS. They actively encouraged mappers and modders by holding competitions and events, further strengthening the community, but then shortly after there was nothing. Then along came the dreaded SDK updates….

I always dread any new Source/SDK update these days as it’s an almost dead cert that they will break something or everything. Worse than this is the complete lack of acknowledgment of it and to top it off we don’t get a fix for weeks, sometimes months. I've noticed this decline in the functionality of the SDK tools as well as QA and support when anything is done to them.

Last Monday, for the first time in months I tried to compile a simple model, it took me an entire day and even then it still had problems! Not because I’m inexperienced in source, nor because their tools are unintuitive (that’s another issue!) but because every damn tool was broken in either the beta or the current SDK release. If model viewer wasn’t crashing the studio compiler was.

Now it may be just me but I’ve noticed that all of this is having a big impact on the Source mapping/modding community as a whole. Im seeing less cool map releases for TF2, Portal etc, and of the ones that there are, I can bet the authors who made them will tell you they had to hack and slash it to get it working properly and probably already had a good knowledge of the engine in the first place. The result of this is that more and more novice and veteran mappers/modders are getting turned off by the Source engine, and as a conciquence the community feels like its dying along with it.

The general feeling I have about Valve now is that they have their core team now and don’t have any more interest in the modding community 'outside'. Sure they have the Portal team, but I feel kind of disappointed that they never look to their own community to give opportunities such as they gave the Portal students.

To quote a recent interview in which they were asked “We see you are looking for new staff, what do you look for in an employee?” it was something along the lines of “someone who can run there own business”. I find that a very disappointing attitude, especially when in a creative industry such as this. Another disappointment was when they announced Steamworks for ‘developers’ At first I thought this would finally the be the solution to supporting mods via Steam, but it seems its for commercial purposes only. After all these years they still have no interest ... sad!

I’m about ready to hang my hat with the Source engine if things don’t improve very soon. We all know that Valve are using superior tools in-house but it seems like they are uninterested in sharing with the community that their company is built upon! Its so frustrating because it goes against everything I thought Valve’s ethics were based upon, and ethics that I have come to believe very strongly in!

I dont hate Valve, far from it, im just very dissapointed in their attitiude towards people like us. :arrow:

[Neil Squibb]

Then we remembered we get the tools for free...

But yes, I concur. Most annoying at the moment.