Recent reviews by professional quackC engineer

half life 2 for lesbians

It's good. Maybe even great. You can tell a lot went into this.

new year's resolution: turn my real life into a yuritopia

Just made it past island 2. I have no idea how to solve the island 3 puzzles, but if I give my unconscious mind enough time to mull them over I'm sure I'll think of something.

Game of the year so far 2016. If you liked English Country Tune (but maybe found it a bit too difficult towards the end) you'll probably love this.

Judging from the other reviews, this game is like Vegemite. Either you get it and you love it, or you don't and you hate it. The reward for completing a puzzle is almost always access to another puzzle, so, to be perfectly clear, if you tend to get angry at inanimate objects or have a short attention span, or just don't see the appeal of 2d maze puzzles no matter their depth, you should avoid this game.

If you like puzzles, though, you've come to the right game. Blow & co. are puzzle-making maniacs and have created a game that teaches you how to solve every puzzle on the island with a carefully balanced, well-paced difficulty curve. The game oozes with polish, has a well-put-together world, looks fantastic, feels sublime, and has plenty of depth and gameplay to offer.

The game has crackling sound in a few places on my machine (earliest in the game in the building with the pots that have Voronoi patterns painted on them.) I didn't feel that it took away from my experience much, but if you have a non-standard sound card you might also have extremely occasional problems with the sound. I have a Xonar DX PCI-E sound card that's never given me trouble with any other game, and it's disappointing that it doesn't work perfectly for this game when the rest of the game is so polished.

Another disappointment, for me at least, is the game's use of lightmaps. I feel that lightmapped games tend to limit the number of moving parts of the world at the expense of gameplay, whether it's Mass Effect, Remember Me, or The Order: 1886, and I think The Witness could have had some really excellent mechanical puzzles beyond what it has if the lighting were more dynamic. I remember between 2004-2008 or so starting with Doom 3 there was a lot of hubbub about making everything dynamically lit and destructible, and there's a lot of gameplay potential that the developers give up the moment they decide to use lightmaps for a game.

Overall, this is my Game of the Year So Far for 2016, and it was a real pleasure to play it. I hope someone at Thekla, Inc. will see fit to give this game a Linux port at some point. Even though there aren't as many gamers on Linux and OS X as there are on Windows, this seems like the type of game that most Linux users would really enjoy, and that many Windows users would not, as the other Steam reviews clearly show. I look forward to seeing what this studio comes up with next.

They finally added a straight line tool

As an experienced Blender user I find it to be effective, fast, and stable. I have a few nitpicks here and there with it, but overall it's one of the best open-source projects out there.

Modeling tools are robust and useful. Blender does have a few fiddly extensions (looking at you BSurfaces) which I generally just don't use, but all the basics are covered and then some. If you need some modeling tool and Blender doesn't have it you can easily write one with Python and the Bmesh API. See the various extensions for some interesting examples (I recommend reading Bsurfaces, LoopTools, and Contours Retopology tools for some more advanced scripting techniques.)

UV layout tools are quite good. For a long time they were some of the best around and lots of Maya users still use Blender for UV layout, but now if you really hate doing UV layouts and want to get them done super-fast you would be wise to invest in licenses for Headus and IPackThat.

Weight painting tools could use some love, but in my opinion weight painting tools in all 3d packages are equally awful. If you have to paint weights I recommend using as much caffeine as won't kill you just so you can get it done and move on with your life. Vertex painting tools are mostly fine, though it's on my personal to-do list to add support for painting and exporting the alpha channel, and support for painting red, green and blue channels independently.

Blender sports two flexible and capable renderers: Cycles which is a path-tracer that can run on GPUs and CPUs, and Blender Internal which is a scanline renderer that can run on CPUs only. Cycles tends to produce more photorealistic images and has diffuse and glossy global illumination built in. Blender Internal is used more situationally and is really handy for motion graphics and non-photorealistic rendering. If you don't turn up all the settings Blender Internal can render faster, so if you need to render an animation on a shoestring budget you'll probably want to use Blender Internal. Both renderers can make use of the built-in compositor which is capable of some serious color grading and camera imperfection effects. I recommend learning how to use Cycles first. (Hint: use the node editor. It will make your life easier.) If you run into some walls with Cycles in terms of scene complexity or general production-readiness you might want to look into a render plugin such as V-ray for Blender, but for the most part you won't need to. With some optimizing jiu-jitsu Cycles and Blender Internal are both plenty capable of rendering high-quality animations and stills. Cycles can do non-photorealistic renders as well and I recommend trying to use it for this purpose at least once, if for nothing other than as an educational exercise. Both renderers support Freestyle, which is a line renderer that can be useful for motion graphics and cartoon-style renders.

Rigging is an area that I don't spend much time working with in Blender but I've had success rigging both by hand and with Rigify, which is the automatic character setup plugin for Blender like Max's Biped, Maya's HumanIK, Epic's Animation and Rigging Tools for Maya, and the Foundry's Automated Character Setup for Modo. Blender supports most things that you'd want to do when setting up a rig, including volume snapping (i.e. snapping bones to the middle of a mesh) and symmetry features. Most attributes can be driven and constrained and everything can be keyframed, and you can set up extremely complicated drivers using Python if you wish. Maya is still slightly better on the rigging front, though, and if all you do is rig I can heartily recommend it.

Animation tools in Blender are generally pretty great. You can set a keyframe on anything and the graph editor and dope sheet are both useful. The timeline is not as robust as Max or Maya but if you sum up dopesheet+graph editor+timeline in each software they will all be about the same in terms of available features and quality. (Personally I dislike animating in Max. It can be done, and it can be done well, but it makes me feel like I need a shower. Or an adult.)

Sculpting tools in Blender are great for building up basic shapes and forms. You can iterate really quickly with dynamic topology and booleans if you use the concept sculpts + retopology workflow. Dynamic topology is a little quicker to work with than Dynamesh but ultimately if you need tons of detail you will be better suited retopologizing your concept sculpt into your final model and taking that retopologized mesh into Zbrush or Mudbox for a final detail pass, since both of those have better performance at very high mesh resolutions. (I find that using a stamp or alpha in Blender is especially notorious for killing sculpt performance.) Or, you can do your final sculpt in Blender and add the tiny details into your normal or bump maps with Blender's mesh paint, procedural texture, and baking features. If your character has lots of pieces and doodads that you can sculpt separately you could easily get a result of similar quality to Mudbox or Zbrush in Blender.

Mesh painting tools are good, especially for diffuse textures and easily rival those of Mudbox and 3d-Coat 4.1. You can mask by mesh curvature or by a bake or texture to solve complicated mesh painting problems. Generally painting performance isn't affected by the resolution of the mesh and you can reasonably paint on meshes with 70000ish polygons. And once you figure out wtf a Dvar is, the mesh painting tools will be able to match Blender Internal specularity or that of most older game engines (Unity 4, Skyrim, Divinity: Original Sin, Dota 2 etc) really well. You can also take your specular color and specular exponent maps and turn them into a plausible roughness map for Cycles with the node-based compositor and some voodoo mathematics.

The baking tools combined with the mesh painting tools actually make Blender a formidable contender for texture creation. The only issue that you'll run into on a regular basis for game art is that none of the bakers (Cycles or Blender Internal again) support antialiased bakes. So you'll likely have to bake at a higher resolution than your final texture to get the result you want. Until someone writes a better baker, you can use Xnormal or just bake at a high resolution.

I don't do much FX work but Blender is decently capable in this field, albeit much less so than Max or Maya with a full rack of plugins or vanilla Houdini. But Blender is plenty capable of making puffs of dust, streaks of magic dust, portals to hell, smaller water splashes, fire and smoke, explosions with debris and rubble, clouds, fog, and so on. There's even an ocean sim which can fulfil all your nautical desires. If you want to be an FX artist for film Houdini is the best choice and is pretty affordable these days, but if it's just an occasional thing Blender can do the job.

One big advantage that Blender has over a package like Max, Maya, Modo, or Maya LT is that it does all of this stuff in an extremely lightweight, portable package. You can run it anywhere without having to fiddle with licenses, even off a flash drive if necessary. It starts in a few seconds and files are generally compatible between versions.

But the biggest advantage that Blender has is that it's free and open-source. This means that if you hate something about the software or if you figure out a way to crash it, you can go in and fix it and submit patches back upstream. And everything can be scripted, which is a big step up from other software at this price range like Maya LT. Great for pros, great for amateurs, great for students, great for freelancers, great for your five-year-old daughter Alexa. Give it a shot.