Autodesk Stingray Game Engine
stingrayengine.com
stingrayengine.com
Yuck.
Although not necessarily intended for kids, it's a place I would have loved to visit as a 8+ year old kid.
They give away all of their software for students (without a crazy verification system!). Obviously they can only do so much, but I've always felt that they've done a lot to make their stuff accessible.
I don't expect any company to be obligated to act as a charity or to offer its products for free. I also don't expect anything from Autodesk. I dislike their proprietary approach to things, which is fine because there are lots of other choices. For many, it's worth it. I'm just expressing my own distaste in their approach.
My source: Could be completely wrong and is based purely on personal data. I help run a local indie game development meetup and have been involved with 3 others and only a few people were using Maya or 3DStudio Max. Mostly because of pricing. However of those working with 3D assets the majority of them are working with Blender or Modo with Unity and Unreal as the primary engines. One or two scenekit/source sdk/cryengine people thrown in there.
Then it's not aimed at indies, obviously; Unity and in recent days the Unreal engine offer fairer prices for them. The bigger game companies probably won't have an issue with using this product though - if it manages to impress them, that is, compared to the established game engines which have years, sometimes decades of development behind them already.
Unless you define indies strictly as amateur/hobbyist I seriously doubt this. All the 3d guys i know (freelancers, small interactive studios, independent developers etc. - none affiliated to a mayor publisher) use Maya or 3D Studio Max.
It's the same as with the Adobe Suite or MS Office - once you consider labor costs, licenses become a second thought if you use something professionally and earn money doing it.
That being said, I don't really see this having a big market either, nobody seems to have any major issues integrating with unity or unreal for now.
Yeah it hasn't gone down much since. The absolute cheapest price is a $1,470 annual subscription. A perpetual license will cost you $3,675.
I wish we had competition in that space. Maybe if Maya hadn't have sold out, we'd have something like the current price war between Unity and Unreal, which is great for games and game developers.
I don't know anyone who uses Modo for animation (its animation tools are very opinionated/idiosyncratic in their approach) and Blender doesn't have much uptake outside of hobbyists. When it comes to rigging and animation, Maya still reigns supreme, crusty though it may be. For hard surface modeling, Modo is the best in class and it just got better with built-in Mesh Fusion in 901, but many people raised on Max and Maya stick to what they know. For organic modeling, ZBrush for sculpting and retopo is the standard, usually with a traditional modeling package in the loop.
I get the feeling this is less targeted at game developers than the people who use Autodesk products for things other than games, who might benefit from a game-like interface.
Game designers use a range of tools, so it's a hard sell to convince people to stick with one suite. But it is Autodesk, they play hard.
iClone is starting to get seriously interesting for the Indy scene. It's not a modeller, but it's no longer a toy. Their marketing department overdoes the "50% off for one week only" thing, which put me off initially, but the application is good. The direct puppet feature is cool. The holy grail might be lip syncing, and is getting better but nobody has an easy solution for that yet. iClone's focus is low-poly so works well with export to Unreal (in theory, I haven't done it yet).
Actually I really hope Epic creates a modelling tool. They currently use Maya in-house and it's awfully clunky: a competitor moving in to their space might hopefully spawn the intention to do the same to Autodesk.
I wish them the best of luck - and I love some of Autodesk's tools - but I don't immediately see why I'd choose this over Unity or Unreal.
I hope they integrate the renderer into Motionbuilder, though. In 2015, the quality of render it's possible to pull from that tool is just embarassing.
(I don't know if this is the case with Unity etc. as I am not a game developer).
The only notable exception is Sketchup. Google bought it instead, just as it went from MVP to software product line. Conveniently for Autodesk, Google pulled the critical feature out of the entry version after a year or two (DXF/DWG support), let development on the professional version languish, and eventually ejected it as a drifting hulk after Revit gained enough traction for institutions to start requiring it as a delivery format for construction designs despite Revit's file format being closed proprietary.
The upper funnel is serious broken here.
"Stingray will be available for purchase on August 19."
Two: Why would we want a engine with Maya or 3DStudioMax interoperability? Most indie developers would not be able to afford Autodesk products because they are so pricey. The only people I know who use Autodesk in the gaming industry are those who make AAA games. If you want to contact the least common denominator, then you need to make some changes to the way you do things.
Unity's UI got better recently (in 4.6+), but Scaleform is still leaps-and-bounds above almost anything on the market.
That, combined with Autodesk Navigation - another very powerful tool they previously charged a lot of money for (pricing for that was even on-demand only), means there's genuine reason to consider this.
The obvious downsides are the lack of free access/assets that you get with Unity, that Unity/Unreal have huge communities and years of YouTube tutorials. But that might come in time.
Perhaps the claims about performance and ease are exaggerated, but maybe they're not. I've worked with Unity for a while, and it certainly isn't perfect. There are some clunky, unintuitive things going on. Don't get me wrong, Unity is a fantastic tool, and our company wouldn't be what it is today without it, but this atleast warrants a look at, for me :)
Please note the bad collision detection at 0:51 when the player walks through the cube, right as the speaker says that.
Lol.
I've been working on a side project in Unreal Engine 4, which is amazing, but you'll notice that the majority of Epic devs work in Maya. Autodesk realized there was opportunity to make some money, and finally released Maya LT subscription for devs, but there are still a ton of import/export and other pipeline issues. I mean Autodesk owns the FBX format but can't get a good pipeline mechanism going for it? Now that I see this, it totally makes sense. They saw what the Epic guys were doing, probably even trolled their codebase for ideas, said "Hey, we can do the same thing but make it proprietary and cost a shit ton, just like all our other stuff, and make tons of bank! All we have to do is make sure our tools work with our tools best and everything else is subpar, and it will force devs who want those features into our camp!" Look at the damn interface, it looks almost identical in layout to UE4!
On a similar note, as a sysadmin with Autocad users, and the most recent quote I got for a single new sub license was $4k+, I am now investigating migrating to open source solutions that can perform everything we need without being licensed into the ground. Not every company has $20k just sitting around for license upgrades...
Edit: I understand my tone is negative, but in this case I think it's warranted. I would appreciate discussion instead of just a downvote please. I also took out the needlessly negative last paragraph.
Without a clear vision of features needed feature creep can really set in. Also different engines are built for different needs and a catchall engine ends up being not too great at anything.
> AND C++ SOURCE CODE, AVAILABLE FOR AN EXTRA FEE
not a good idea to get developers.