Extremely Depressed

As stated, I am very sad.

(from http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/)

More than 10 years of programming, multiple jobs, and even an engineering degree later, I'm still not happy.

Here's why:

Blender, being the free opensource 3D wondertool had intrigued me from when I first found it. However, after years of playing, making animations, and games using this tool, now that I entered the realm of 'real' game development, blender is severely lacking in multiple areas.

1. Armatures

The concept of a armature is invalid; The 3D graphics hardware you have and have had since 1970's has always been of the 'projection matrix' * 'modelview matrix' => output raster position. Now, modern 3D hardware has the ability to be programmed, so, people like me can code in fully articulated characters by adding weights per vertex and writing a simple vertex shader that multiplies by each joints matrix.
Blender does not conform to this universal standard; IT instead tries to 'make it easy' by giving you a 'bone', which, here's the serious problem: It has a length. Matrices deform from their center, not an arbitrary point. This makes conversion to my game and from my game to blender impossible, thus, blender cannot be used for the animation pipeline. Any attempt to 'hack' blender into making this work is a waste of time; True, you can constrain your game a lot, but if you had 1/100th the experience I do, you would know better. Now for another point; Even with armatures, blenders animation system is designed for movies; That is, everything works on a global timeline via global IPO keys. No game works like this, so combining run + walk animations becomes very difficult, as well as keeping track of current animation track data. They have botched and fluffed over this for years; No positive results yet.
In conclusion, thanks to a broken bone system and incompatible animation keying system, I now no longer have a animation tool my artists can use for our pipeline.

2. Space conversions

Blender doesn't use math centric +x forward, +y left, +z up space consistently. This causes nothing but headaches for everyone. There is no justification for having inconsistent coordinate systems, pick a coordinate system and make your entire program be consistent.

3. Pipeline

When I make a model in blender, I use my character sketches and some quick concept coloring. Blender makes mesh modeling quick, which is nice. However, when I finish with my model, I want to take the data out, and put it into my game. There are many options for this, but, I usually have to write my own converter. Given, every single update of blender, guess what? My converter breaks somehow thanks to a undocumented python function or change in the way things work. Usually the breaks are not too large, but this is a lot of my time wasted for something that the program should do automatically; For instance, 'dump ascii' should export a large, concisely documented ascii file of all the data for the current selection, including it's linked data and so forth. If they wrote a game engine in blender, why can;t we dump that data out? And why do I keep having to make more converters to spit out a text file?

4. Data Model

Blender uses a older C-Data model. This is a good one to use, however, I would like to have more data model tools; For instance, if everything is reference counted and deleted on zero counts fine; But let me control that and show it to me in the OOPS or a special 'data tree' viewer. As a developer, I need control for that data to better improve the exporting I have to write for this tool. Also, sometimes blender files get junked up with bad chunks from older files. And, more importantly, where is the .blend to ascii converter? That would be very nice to have.

5. Next Gen Content

Blender currently is pathetic when it comes to this; Let's say I want to make a MGS4 snake. No problem you say, and model out a nice 3300 poly Pliskin and then build an armature for him. Now, you can bend and animate him with some ease, though, lookie here, his shoulder bends funny! Well, after about an hour of tweaking the armature, you got it to look better, but not commercial quality. Now you have to generate a mesh keyframe and link it to a python controller that listens to the armature. Okay, fine. But, how do you export that data out of the system? And how do you ever preview your animations if keyframes are global application? Hm, looks like you have a severe problem editing keyframes and armature actions. OH NO, you added visemes so snake could talk; Looks like there's no way to make animations except by manually entering times on the timeline; oh, and look, while he's talking the python controlled armature actuator is fuzzing the keyframes... Looks like you just wasted 8 hours fighting a system that wouldn't work anyways.
Enough bitching about that example; Point is, if you have a animation system, but 1 special component can have 'local' timelines (armature 'actions'), why can't mesh keyframes and other animation systems have 'time strips' that you can make, so that your main animation system can paste strips together? Oh what's that? NLA? only works with armature actions, sorry. Unless you're making a movie with no dynamic content, you're SOL here. And try writing an exporter for that. At least they finally added GLSL to the damn system.



I'm so depressed. What do I do, write my own tool like FrameGL3 (already solved all these problems myself btw; SDS, IK, anims, ect...) or do I just give up? This is a lot of work for anyone to undertake; Only because of the gruntwork required. More importantly, there has to be someone else who has this problem, but where is there solution?


Also, being unable to crack 'Dragon Quest Swords' funky LZSS type compression really has me down. But not down like Valgirt Nedlog has me down; fucker's hard!


Maybe I should give it all up for a while, like, a year or something...


I'm in the wrong fucking state/country/planet...


-Z


As a side note; I've hacked the graphics out of Primal Rage 2; Killer Instinct; Wario World; Super Smash Bros; Turok; and many other games just to learn how they built their data, as my ONLY FORM OF VALIDATION that what I have been doing is correct.