next »

[kamac]

Adobe has revealed their own game engine that is to compete with Unity, Unreal and CryEngine. ( Apparently it's their earlier "BitSquid" engine evolved, or simply with a changed name. Here's their blog: http://bitsquid.blogspot.co.uk/ )

http://stingrayengine.com/

* Code in LUA or use visual scripting
* Crossplatform
* $30 / month = access to the engine & maya LT

Well they sure will have a hard time competing with the others.

[JWki]

That's interesting, the bitsquid blog has always been a great resource especially for data oriented programming.
If I recall correctly, the devs said that the engine is really lightweight, only about 300k lines of code (which is not so much compared to Unreal with roughly 3 million lines, or Ubisoft's AnvilNext with about 6 millionen lines of code).
Lines of code may not be a metric to choose an engine by, but it's a symptom of a different mindset and design which might make this an appealing alternative to Unity and Unreal for some developers.

[eyeliner]

30 dollars a month is a strange choice.

[gimymblert]

well we have seen flash so ...

[darkhog]

Nope, it's from Autodesk. Yes, the very same which destroyed 3DS Max and now try to do same thing to Maya.

Also I've tried it (there's free trial) and... Well, one of Unity Forums users summed it pretty well:

Ok, tried out some stingray, these are my thoughts:

• I really like how easy it was to start up a template project. Unity should learn from this and offer several template projects in the start screen.
• Instead of the offering a preinitialized environment, you have to initialize it yourself (in code). That's kinda annoying.
• Adding a camera to an empty scene does not make it render the scene - you have to hook it up in an initialization script.
• You can only see local variables in the debugger. No watches.
• The intelli-sense is fake. Suggests all methods/properties for whatever symbol (existing or not).
• Very verbose:

Game.camera_unit = Game.world.unit_by_name(Game.world, "camera")
I haven't seen syntax like that since C days.

• A bit buggy regarding a lot of things, but that's to be expected of a first release so I won't dive into that.
• You cannot parent or unparent things in the editor.
• Does not seem to be component based regarding scripts / flow (visual scripting). Instead of creating behaviors that are added to any object, you define 1 Flow (visual scripting) for each model, or you can have a global script handling the behavior.
• Overall, the feeling I'm getting looking at their samples is just spaghetti:

Code: (CSharp)

function Player.spawn_player(level, view_position, view_rotation)
    if not level then
        print "ERROR: No current level - cannot spawn"
        return
    end

    local player = Player()

    spawn_freecam_player(player, level, view_position, view_rotation)
    PlayerHud:init_hud()
    play_spawn_sound()
    enable_walk_mode(player)
    play_ambient_sound()

    Appkit.manage_level_object(level, Player, player)
end

local function spawn_player_character(self, pose)
    local world = SimpleProject.world
    local land_unit = World.spawn_unit(world, "content/models/character/skm_chr_genrig_3p", pose)

    local land_character = self.land_character
    land_character.unit = land_unit

    -- Add Character input movement.
    local controller = UnitController(land_character, land_unit, Appkit.input_mapper)
    controller:set_move_speed(character_move_speed:unbox())
    controller:set_yaw_speed(character_cam_yaw_speed)
    controller:set_pitch_speed(character_cam_pitch_speed)
    controller:set_mover("body")
    controller:set_gravity_enabled(true)
end

Might be a nice addition to the engine market, but it doesn't really interest me. It doesn't do anything better than any other engine afaik.

[InfiniteStateMachine]

how are they trying to destory maya? Or max for that matter?

I've been using max for 15+ years and it's more or less software that's about as feature complete as it's gonna get. There's almost never a time where I want a feature in a newer max except for maybe LSCM mapping, otherwise I'd be happy with max9.

[diegzumillo]

Any competition is good for the market. Competing with Unity will be tough though.

[InfiniteStateMachine]

Perf will be interesting since the development team has been writing a lot of C++ specific perf articles on engine development the last 6 years.

http://bitsquid.blogspot.ca/

[Serapth]

how are they trying to destory maya? Or max for that matter?

I've been using max for 15+ years and it's more or less software that's about as feature complete as it's gonna get. There's almost never a time where I want a feature in a newer max except for maybe LSCM mapping, otherwise I'd be happy with max9.

Had he said Softimage, now that I can surely agree with.  You can easily argue that in the 90s/00s Autodesk competed by buying up the competition, but that's basically old news now.  The only remaining question is if Maya and Max remain separate products.  My guess is eventually Max will require a code rewrite ( it's an older code base than Maya ) and they will take the opportunity to create one product to ruin rule them all.

[InfiniteStateMachine]

I've been studying the maya codebase lately and their design is quite frankly amazing and shows a remarkable amount of foresight. It's written in a way that I can't see the need for much of a rewrite.

Max on the other hand I havent had a lot of experience with but from talking to co-workers who have developed on both codebases, it's not nearly as nice.

I still prefer max for environment and hard surface modeling but the new features in maya 2015+ are certainly starting to gain parity. Finally maya has a decent connect edge tool.