You're right - what I should have said is that a local store owner is getting the direct profits of their labor. I admit that one of the short-term benefits of a big box store coming to town is that their lowest paid employees get more protections. This comes at the cost of being held at arms length from the actual power structure of the company and makes the dollar general's business practices more unsustainable.
Dollar General is a mega corporation that can operate on an entirely different level than local stores. They pay their workers less and the profits go out of state. On a store-by-store basis though, Dollar general is a fragile establishment, management will not hesitate to abandon the location if they are spending too much money propping up the store. And the overhead for these stores is higher than it needs to be - they build way larger stores and parking lots than they actually need. The local dry goods store has grown only to the size that it requires, and those profits go towards its own survival. It provides cultural value, economic opportunities, and is more likely to improve the lives of people living nearby.
Strong towns (who made the article) is a grassroots nonprofit that finds concrete ways for US cities to curb the effects of urban sprawl. One of those ways is to acknowledge that inviting huge commercial ventures into your small local economy is like bringing a giant mammal to roam free on a small island nation. It's probably going to affect the ecosystem in ways that don't suit the environment.
This is actually why rotational math is more complicated in 3d than you would expect. It's something game developers get used to, because accessing and modifying a rotation requires knowing what the orientation is relative to a fourth axis. That's what a quaternion is. In the situation of this story, it's in reference to the milky way's vertical axis.
Model viewer is a nice tool! I was paid to make some assets for a model viewer website, but I couldn't get any of my model's colors to show correctly. Once I realized that AO was used as direct exposure value, it was smooth sailing ahead.
Most of the time I can't control what light my models are shown in, so it was great to have some control of how it was presented.
My guess is that their dubious disposability works against them. You can get self-heated coffee and ramen in a lot of Japanese vending machines, which makes sense because Japan is the capital of non-biodegradable disposables.
I was hoping their big announcement was going to be Procreate for PC, but I'm happy for all the people out there who will benefit from better accessible tools.
Pretty amazing results. It would be fun to work as a traveling 3D capture artist, going to novel locations and scanning assets to use in fantasy worlds.
As someone who went into a STEM field without any family connections to STEM, I have definitely been stuck eating carrots and not knowing why it didn't work.
Interestingly, the human brain tells itself carrot stories all the time:
tldr: patients with split brain hemispheres will reflexively make up explanations for decisions made by the other half of their brains. Fascinating stuff, and makes me wonder how many things I've done that serve my subconscious' ulterior motives.
Certainly a step above what a normal person could do in a 3D modeling program. The interesting thing about this type of stuff is that it would be harder for a professional to use those meshes as a base model; the topology doesn't lend itself to their process. For example -- the banana peels are puffy and two-dimensional. It would have to be completely restructured to be a convincingly peeled banana. So either the generated model has to be a finished product, or they are cost-effectively useless. CAD files are notoriously bad, and those are nice and mathematically easy to break down.
Material Maker is surprisingly alone in the PBR material department for FOSS, I have started thinking about diving into the PRs just to get it up to snuff with Substance. I can hardly pay for Photoshop, Adobe!
Hi Evan, I enjoyed this blog post a lot. I released my first indie game this February, after working on it since graduating college. It has made 3x my normal job's salary -- I'm still torn about whether to make a sequel and go full time, or stick with my usual 9 to 5. Let me know if you have any good tips!
I think gamedev was also a very big escape for me since middle school, and your post reminded me a lot of those dark times.
I also agree that games are an art, I went from drawing -> modeling -> rendering -> programming, so it was easier for me to reach those conclusions.
Making a game to show off your cleverness is definitely not the best motivation, but I have found that it can improve the game's "experience" if you can harness that feeling. Straddling the line between personal interest, feasibility, and market value is maybe the most important thing to get right as a solo developer in my opinion. I could see developers who got lucky with their obsessions getting absolutely devastated with their lack of hits afterwards (something I'm afraid of doing myself!).
The comment about the twitter gamedev scene being driven by terminally online people is very accurate, although I still admire some of the more educational/resource oriented ones for their sheer willpower.
Depth is a useful parameter for controlnet, especially when you want really specific forms. I've found that it can hamper outputs because blank sections of solid color are interpreted as flat walls, when really I'm trying to make those parts ambiguous!
Observations from a long time fan and game developer:
1. Early on in the trailer, it shows a road segment being drawn across an existing road, with the intersection getting automatically added. This is a big step up from the original road system where every intersection must be placed at the end of a road segment. I imagine this will make it easier to create nice geometric patterns.
2. Some cities shown have surface parking taking up a whole plot. I hope this isn't just cosmetic - allowing more/less parking should really influence the economics and transport methods of each citizen.
3. In the data view mode, bright colors bleed onto the white building models. I suspect there's some dynamic ambient light bounce rendering going on here!
4. It looks like the old method of plot zoning is still around, showing as grid squares along the side of the roads. I would have liked to see non-square parcels that fill up the availible space, but I also understand why square plots would make it easier to fill with pre-made assets.
5. Speaking of pre-made assets, those skyscrapers look really similar and boring. Walk around any modern city with glass towers and you'll see a lot more variation and interesting nuances, while still being relatively performant to render in a game like this. I'm worried they will introduce actual variety via drip-fed dlc assets. Yes, mods can fix that, but you can't beat the visual consistency and performance of decent vanilla resources.
6. Looks like the town hall starts off as a huge parking lot with a small office in the middle, and can be expanded into multiple departments. Looks like a handy mechanic, and especially believable for North American development since a lot of government buildings are like 75% pavement.