Howitzer - Lore Invasion Style

For the forthcoming siege gametype mission in Lore we needed a big powerful artillery cannon for the bases. Instantly what came to my mind was a Howitzer cannon that is used by pretty much every regular army on the face of the planet today. Of course though being Lore, I needed to make it a bit more "future like" and add some typical Lore flavor to it.

After a few sketches (sorry didn't scan them in yet), here is the polygonal model that will be used in-game:



And of course the obligatory UVW layout:



Next step the high poly version of the model, I will post those images in the next day or so.

The Cult of SoftImage

It seems that the shit has truely hit the fan. Unlike the Alias purchase where Max and Maya users were concerened, but in a fairly polite way, about the future of their applications, the SoftImage purchase has been quite the opposite.

I hate to generalize the SoftImage users, but for the most part every hardcore user I have met has been indoctrinated into the "SoftImage is the greatest application ever" mentality from the very first day that they used it (personal opinion: its a good app, just not the 'end all, be all' that people claim). Unfortunately this eventually evolved itself into the whole "Cult of SoftImage", which is where we get our problem that we are in now. A full cross-internet smear campaign where these jokers are bashing what is really the only good move for a true future for SoftImage.

Contrary to what they will like to beleive SoftImage had no future with AVID. According to this article (which does a great job of outlining the purchase), SoftImage amounted to a paltry sum of $4 million in profit for AVID (on an estimated $16 million in sales). This is an incredibly low amount of money and really outlines how poorly SoftImage tools sold on market. Worse yet it also means that SoftImage tools do not benefit from a R&D level needed to continue to grow and succeed.

"...according to Marc Stevens, General Manager of Softimage, decided that to grow in the 3D market they would need to make a very significant investment and thus the best thing for both Softimage and AVID was to sell the division, "at that point we started a pretty extensive process, we spoke to a lot of people, ... Autodesk was not the first company approached by AVID" he commented to fxguide."

Reading what has been said it is pretty clear there was no future for SoftImage tools at AVID, its sales did not dictate an increase in R&D spending to ensure that the application would grow and AVID itself did not want to risk spending on an application that continued to be a distant #3 application in terms of sales. Yes SoftImage tools had made some good progress over the years, but in terms of where they are now, to where they were 5 years ago, the tools have gone from something incredible to something average simply because the competition has been evolving while SoftImage tools remained essentially stagnent (yes I place Max and Maya in the average level too, and I say average because no app is better than the other 3, it may have an area it excells in but it also has an area its weak in). So it makes no sense to me why the hell the "Cult of SoftImage" would be bashing this idea and Autodesk to no end... well except for the fact that the whole beleive system that made up the "Cult of SoftImage"" came crashing down on their heads.

Autodesk now Rules the Big 3 in 3D

In case you missed it, Autodesk has just signed an agreement to aquire the SoftImage suite of tools from AVID for a paltry $35 million (much less than they paid for Alias). This means that Autodesk now controls the 3 biggest 3D application on the market and aside from Lightwave and some boutique tools such as Zbrush or Modo, really has no competition.

Personally though I am glad to see this happen. Not because I am a fan of Autodesk, but because I think that the developers of SoftImage were getting a royal screw job as a part of AVID. AVID's only desire is to make editing and compositing applications, it had no desire to be in the 3D market and was only in it because it coveted the editing tools SoftImage had (ie. SoftImage|DS). As such, its 3D tools were left in limbo with little support from the parent corporation to continue to evolve.

So how will SoftImage tools evolve under Autodesk ownership? Well simply put Autodesk invests something like $100 mill a year in R&D (it should be noted its pretty much the only 3D company investing serious cash like this), which in turn translates down into its many various 3D applications. 3DS Max and Maya have benefitted from this increased R&D and only a complete idiot would tell you that over the past five or six years that they haven't been slowly positioned into some powerful strategic positions and swayed the tide back in their favor. So it's not hard to see that SoftImage will benefit from being a part of the Autodesk umbrella as well.

Now I am sure that we will see a lot of fear mongering going around about this, with pissed off XSI users screaming bloody murder. But really I do not see any need to be concerned... well not yet at least.

iTGB... opening new door possibilities

Max Gaming got our hands on iTGB, one of the two game engines produced by GarageGames to make Torque based games on the iPhone!

I have to say that I am personally pretty excited about this since one of the primary reasons for getting the iPhone (which is btw the worlds shittiest Cellular Phone on the market). Plus I really feel that it opens the doors to some good opportunities for us to produce some nice simple games that we normally would not have done because finding a market for them is pretty time consuming.

More to come about this later.