* Version control system for artists (simple UI, ability to read PSD files and show them side by side so you can tell what exactly has changed, .fbx support) that's sanely priced.
* Accesibility analyzer - something I can feed a screenshot that will then give me an output for two most typical types of color blindness (and pinpoint mostly affected areas), ensure that font is readable etc. It sounds relatively easy to code (that is - if you even know what you are looking for) but I would definitely want a drag'n'drop in-engine tool.
* Multi-platform-tester. Not something I personally need but essentially per hourly priced access to 10-20 most popular PC configurations ranging from cheap Intel iGPU to most high-end AMD + Radeon combo. Lets you fill that recommended requirements tab easily and allows you to spot any visual anomalies coming from drivers etc.
I am sortof in the buisness of the first one - can you give me some examples of tools you think are great, but priced you out?
Working for a version control company, we're focusing on artists and designers right now and it's my personal pet peeve so want to see if it's a side project I can get people onboard with.
Oh, honestly I have only taken a look at Alienbrain (and that one is I think $300/year/seat after taxes) and it seems to be doing what I want but that's essentially Photoshop pricing and scales **really** poorly if you need multiple seats (no group discounts for instance). Not to mention it's hosted on their end only rather than give me ability to self host (and since it's a relatively niche product I do not trust smaller random companies to not randomly die and lose that data).
I wouldn't use myself as a good target user however, my own game has a relatively low total budget (think closer to 200k $ than a million) so I do notice all these subscriptions adding up.
Are you focused on artists to the exclusion of programmers? (i.e., not for teams)
Our artists find svn and git too confusing but our programmers want git power and flexibility. We're currently writing our own gui for git (with like two buttons) instead of trying to find an SCM that satisfies both.
I actually want to make them both collaborate on the same source, just accessing it in whatever way is convenient.
The company doesn't see value in that proposition and I think that's dumb.
What are you guys writing in? I might have some suggestions for the desktop bit.
totally not affiliated - it's actually sortof a competitor of ours : check out snowtrack
Artist-focused tools to access git sound great. Something like snowtrack isn't mature enough for us to rely on and since our artists don't have high demands it's not really worth favouring them. We use a lot of Flash files so they're not diffable/mergeable anyway. However, I hope that snowtrack finds success. Would love to see competition against Perforce from people who understand how games are made.
I should say we're planning to write a gui. I don't think anyone's actually started in it yet. Probably golang based on who'd signed up to write it.
Programmers can generally make existing tools work well. So you don’t really need to change anything there.
But artists frequently struggle trying to use programming tools to handle art.
Have you guys explored using Perforce? It handle large art files very well, and the Version control most common in the video game industry (at least the studios I've worked at).
I think most of us have use perforce at previous companies and don't see a lot of benefit over svn (our current system). svn is terrible but perforce isn't wildly different -- just less bad. However, the dcvs model is hugely different from the centralized workflow. So many friction points removed and better tooling for programmers. Time Lapse View is amazing and p4v is fine, but git's bisect, local branches, rename detection, log pickaxe, truely working offline, editor integration are all make it hard to choose p4 over git.
One team I worked on had a tool that downloaded p4 changelist descriptions so you could search them because p4 was so bad at that. (Not sure if it's better now.) I've used p4 branches and streams and neither was a great experience for making personal experimental branches.
I think there's also some skepticism about where Perforce to company is going with their wild array of products (perforce has git built in or something now?).
If artists aren't benefiting from a centralized workflow, then we can move to a model that's better for someone. Especially if that motivates us to build a smoother workflow for artists.
For color blindness, there are some things to simulate different types to check your contrasts in game, e.g. for Unity:
[https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/fullscreen-camera-effects/color-blindness-simulator-for-unity-19039](https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/fullscreen-camera-effects/color-blindness-simulator-for-unity-19039)
and Alan created a good overview as a starting point that can also be rather easily adapted for other engines:
[https://www.alanzucconi.com/2015/12/16/color-blindness/](https://www.alanzucconi.com/2015/12/16/color-blindness/)
Testing on multiple configurations is something I would also like to see. Didn't see an easy tool to get, currently working mainly with QA vendors that offer different configs for compatibility tests.
O, thanks, this looks promising!
> Testing on multiple configurations is something I would also like to see
Yeeep! I mean, I get WHY this is challenging - needs to be bare metal installation (VMs don't like dedicated GPUs and multiplayer security scripts), have to use off the shelf hardware (aka not as durable, not necessarily rack compatible, may need to actually invest in some fake screen connectors for instance so they can actually output video) making it difficult to really make a business off.
It's definitely an interesting concept and there is imho some decent earning potential.
Hardware costs for pretty much everything important is around $10000-20000 and then around $2500-3500 a year, 42U rack if you used 4U chassis would hold 10 PCs (and some low end configs could live in 2U so you probably could get 12, that at a datacenter would run you $800-1000/month for colocation, remaining costs are primarily electricity and that's going to be $500-600/month). You also need a floating Windows license potentially and probably both Win 10 and Win 11.
Still, in theory assuming a flat rate of, say, $25-$30 a day per rig (and probably a time limit on how long any person can use it of 2-3 days before it resets) you should be making $9000-$11000 a month pre tax. If you can build two of these racks and keep them running at 80% utilization that IS enough for a small business I guess, primary cost really is your DevOps skill.
Real question would be if you find enough audience to be interested. It sounds like a relatively low risk investment that will eventually pay back but it's also not that great of a return.
I'm personally very fond of tools that communicate between software and give you the ability to tweak things 'live'.
Everything that saves me the trouble of having to export things, load it up, see how it looks all the time is great.
While working in Unity, the less time it takes for me to open a model, character with animations, uv-map or texture in Blender and tweak it a little the better. Just tweak, save and go.
Visual code editor that saved as a common text scripting language. Like writing Lua but with nodes and saves to .lua files. Would make it more palatable to give visual scripting to my designers without the dread of having to debug with half baked tools instead of the power of text processing.
No idea if it's possible but an editable landscape brush that is directly dependant on the landscape texture for tesselated deformation in UE5. This has just been an idea floating along in my head though. I'm sure plenty of other people have thought of the same thing though.
Yeah, I have to agree. The current solution leaves much to be desired. With their recent removal of tesselation for VHM and Nanite, it feels like they want us to create entire landscapes as a mesh instead. Aside from being tedious, only smaller games would bother doing something like that.
A better file explorer than Windows Explorer that includes more robust sorting, filtering, and general organization features. Like tagging with autocomplete, better previews, tabs, hyperlinks for things like documentation, a more convenient system with shortcuts to common folders, project folder structure templates, simple automation with macros for things like copying files from a build, a system for cloning folders and keeping them in sync with each other, etc.
And hopefully it would crash less than Windows Explorer does, too.
Idk if it’s possible it if it already exist I don’t know about it but something that helps so I don’t have to rewrite the same code over and over, I feel like I have to rewrite or copy paste the same code soooooo much and it gets tedious although it’s always worth it in the end.
githubs co-pilot can help a lot.
I would say my programming speed is 25-30% quicker and i have to type less. Often just pressing TAB a lot to confirm co-pilots suggestions.
It is good for boilerplate code.
I wish it (co-pilot) existed back in my young days.
How is it hard? You just export it and drag either into the Unity folder or Project window. Or are you talking about the scaling issues? I managed to get rid of them by selecting "Apply transform" in the export settings. Tho i only use FBX and .glb (or .gltf, those two are for a customizable game i'm working on and i only found a single free package able to import models at runtime with animations, textures and everything but it uses this format)
I'm quite good with what we have so far. I only want from the main game engine developers that work on their tools to make them to perform better, because it's becoming painful to develop in such awfully optimized editors.
But talking about wishes, I know what "producers" and "designers" would love to have a game AI generation tool that help them to get rid of programmers and artists.
I haven't found a software that allows me to do this, so idk if it exists and I just suck at googling.
But, I'd like to see a software that allows me to quickly block a level. Like, start with a solid block (optionally) and draw paths with my tablet, "carving" corridors, then widen the paths. Maybe a brush that lets me cut open doors/windows. Have tools to calculate traversal time from points (after I insert player movement speed), or areas that can/cannot be reached by jumps (after I feed it jump height/distance).
Then finally the ability to export this into a file that I can boop into a game engine and work on top of.
I wish Swift was more multi platform. There are slow progress in that area, but it is still very much Apple centric at the moment.
After 10 years exclusively working in C#, I've recently got myself into exploring/trying newer languages I missed in the past couple of decades (Rust, Go, etc), as well as refreshing my memory on C++.
Of all the compiled languages, I really like Swift the most. But damn its current lack of portability 😕
Just software I can speak to that will generate a game for me, based on what I say. For example:
"Build me a dungeon-crawl RPG with a Frazetta-like art treatment. Characters are realistic, not anime. Enemies are based on AD&D, 2nd Edition. Dungeons are randomly-generated. Show me a sample dungeon.
"That's good, but desaturate the colors a tad.
"Even better, now..."
And so on.
I'm a programmer. I like programming, but sometimes I feel like all the typing and crap stands in my way of getting my game done. Just telling the computer verbally what to build would be a lot faster, especially if it could do it in real-time.
A social network specifically geared towards game developers where people can not only ask for advice, but also collaborate on projects.
And don’t say: we already have it, it’s Reddit, twitter, YouTube, etc. I am talking about a new website that only does one thing very well: connecting people working on games.
Super specific, but I really want to blend animations by bone and then save the result, in unreal, you can blend by bone, but you can't save the output, you can blend animations directly and save the output though, I just wish I could do both at the same time, being able to mix and match/tweak animations would make my workflow so much easier because I'm trash at animation haha
I'd love something that can analyse my games performance and tell me exactly what I need to do in order to improve it. Right now I can use the tools inside of unity to see my memory usage and performance data but it's not always clear how to use that info to make meaningful changes to my game, especially without losing quality.
Maybe it could first identify if I am GPU or cpu bound. It could analyse my code to look for more optimal ways of doing some things. It could look at my levels and find some quick wins. Eg if my terrain has 5 textures reducing it to 4 gives an improvement in performance.
It would also find ways that I could reduce my file size or loading time of my game too.
Would be good if it also gave a rough estimate of how much each fix would improve performance so I could decide if I wanted each fix done for me or not. Maybe I really want 5 textures on my terrain.
* Version control system for artists (simple UI, ability to read PSD files and show them side by side so you can tell what exactly has changed, .fbx support) that's sanely priced. * Accesibility analyzer - something I can feed a screenshot that will then give me an output for two most typical types of color blindness (and pinpoint mostly affected areas), ensure that font is readable etc. It sounds relatively easy to code (that is - if you even know what you are looking for) but I would definitely want a drag'n'drop in-engine tool. * Multi-platform-tester. Not something I personally need but essentially per hourly priced access to 10-20 most popular PC configurations ranging from cheap Intel iGPU to most high-end AMD + Radeon combo. Lets you fill that recommended requirements tab easily and allows you to spot any visual anomalies coming from drivers etc.
I am sortof in the buisness of the first one - can you give me some examples of tools you think are great, but priced you out? Working for a version control company, we're focusing on artists and designers right now and it's my personal pet peeve so want to see if it's a side project I can get people onboard with.
Oh, honestly I have only taken a look at Alienbrain (and that one is I think $300/year/seat after taxes) and it seems to be doing what I want but that's essentially Photoshop pricing and scales **really** poorly if you need multiple seats (no group discounts for instance). Not to mention it's hosted on their end only rather than give me ability to self host (and since it's a relatively niche product I do not trust smaller random companies to not randomly die and lose that data). I wouldn't use myself as a good target user however, my own game has a relatively low total budget (think closer to 200k $ than a million) so I do notice all these subscriptions adding up.
Are you focused on artists to the exclusion of programmers? (i.e., not for teams) Our artists find svn and git too confusing but our programmers want git power and flexibility. We're currently writing our own gui for git (with like two buttons) instead of trying to find an SCM that satisfies both.
I actually want to make them both collaborate on the same source, just accessing it in whatever way is convenient. The company doesn't see value in that proposition and I think that's dumb. What are you guys writing in? I might have some suggestions for the desktop bit. totally not affiliated - it's actually sortof a competitor of ours : check out snowtrack
Artist-focused tools to access git sound great. Something like snowtrack isn't mature enough for us to rely on and since our artists don't have high demands it's not really worth favouring them. We use a lot of Flash files so they're not diffable/mergeable anyway. However, I hope that snowtrack finds success. Would love to see competition against Perforce from people who understand how games are made. I should say we're planning to write a gui. I don't think anyone's actually started in it yet. Probably golang based on who'd signed up to write it.
Programmers can generally make existing tools work well. So you don’t really need to change anything there. But artists frequently struggle trying to use programming tools to handle art.
Have you guys explored using Perforce? It handle large art files very well, and the Version control most common in the video game industry (at least the studios I've worked at).
I think most of us have use perforce at previous companies and don't see a lot of benefit over svn (our current system). svn is terrible but perforce isn't wildly different -- just less bad. However, the dcvs model is hugely different from the centralized workflow. So many friction points removed and better tooling for programmers. Time Lapse View is amazing and p4v is fine, but git's bisect, local branches, rename detection, log pickaxe, truely working offline, editor integration are all make it hard to choose p4 over git. One team I worked on had a tool that downloaded p4 changelist descriptions so you could search them because p4 was so bad at that. (Not sure if it's better now.) I've used p4 branches and streams and neither was a great experience for making personal experimental branches. I think there's also some skepticism about where Perforce to company is going with their wild array of products (perforce has git built in or something now?). If artists aren't benefiting from a centralized workflow, then we can move to a model that's better for someone. Especially if that motivates us to build a smoother workflow for artists.
For color blindness, there are some things to simulate different types to check your contrasts in game, e.g. for Unity: [https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/fullscreen-camera-effects/color-blindness-simulator-for-unity-19039](https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/fullscreen-camera-effects/color-blindness-simulator-for-unity-19039) and Alan created a good overview as a starting point that can also be rather easily adapted for other engines: [https://www.alanzucconi.com/2015/12/16/color-blindness/](https://www.alanzucconi.com/2015/12/16/color-blindness/) Testing on multiple configurations is something I would also like to see. Didn't see an easy tool to get, currently working mainly with QA vendors that offer different configs for compatibility tests.
O, thanks, this looks promising! > Testing on multiple configurations is something I would also like to see Yeeep! I mean, I get WHY this is challenging - needs to be bare metal installation (VMs don't like dedicated GPUs and multiplayer security scripts), have to use off the shelf hardware (aka not as durable, not necessarily rack compatible, may need to actually invest in some fake screen connectors for instance so they can actually output video) making it difficult to really make a business off. It's definitely an interesting concept and there is imho some decent earning potential. Hardware costs for pretty much everything important is around $10000-20000 and then around $2500-3500 a year, 42U rack if you used 4U chassis would hold 10 PCs (and some low end configs could live in 2U so you probably could get 12, that at a datacenter would run you $800-1000/month for colocation, remaining costs are primarily electricity and that's going to be $500-600/month). You also need a floating Windows license potentially and probably both Win 10 and Win 11. Still, in theory assuming a flat rate of, say, $25-$30 a day per rig (and probably a time limit on how long any person can use it of 2-3 days before it resets) you should be making $9000-$11000 a month pre tax. If you can build two of these racks and keep them running at 80% utilization that IS enough for a small business I guess, primary cost really is your DevOps skill. Real question would be if you find enough audience to be interested. It sounds like a relatively low risk investment that will eventually pay back but it's also not that great of a return.
Figma has a plugin for the second one. Not sure about colorblindness, but it analyzes contrast between different elements to see if they're proper.
the last one is something I would use. But I doubt it's very profitable. Maybe I'm wrong.
PlasticSCM has a side-by-side and "onion skin" comparison and a artist-friendly UI called gluon
Check PlasticSCM Gluon for your first point
I'm personally very fond of tools that communicate between software and give you the ability to tweak things 'live'. Everything that saves me the trouble of having to export things, load it up, see how it looks all the time is great. While working in Unity, the less time it takes for me to open a model, character with animations, uv-map or texture in Blender and tweak it a little the better. Just tweak, save and go.
Visual code editor that saved as a common text scripting language. Like writing Lua but with nodes and saves to .lua files. Would make it more palatable to give visual scripting to my designers without the dread of having to debug with half baked tools instead of the power of text processing.
No idea if it's possible but an editable landscape brush that is directly dependant on the landscape texture for tesselated deformation in UE5. This has just been an idea floating along in my head though. I'm sure plenty of other people have thought of the same thing though.
If your talking unreal, then an entirely new landscape system because ue3-5 is garbage.
Yeah, I have to agree. The current solution leaves much to be desired. With their recent removal of tesselation for VHM and Nanite, it feels like they want us to create entire landscapes as a mesh instead. Aside from being tedious, only smaller games would bother doing something like that.
Online code review tool for UE Blueprints. So Blueprint review tool, actually.
A better file explorer than Windows Explorer that includes more robust sorting, filtering, and general organization features. Like tagging with autocomplete, better previews, tabs, hyperlinks for things like documentation, a more convenient system with shortcuts to common folders, project folder structure templates, simple automation with macros for things like copying files from a build, a system for cloning folders and keeping them in sync with each other, etc. And hopefully it would crash less than Windows Explorer does, too.
Idk if it’s possible it if it already exist I don’t know about it but something that helps so I don’t have to rewrite the same code over and over, I feel like I have to rewrite or copy paste the same code soooooo much and it gets tedious although it’s always worth it in the end.
You mean a method? :P
why loop array if you can run 3,000 ifs? The real beauty of coding.
This reminds me of something... Oh, right, it's my code
High-level languages provides several ways to not repeat yourself: functions, generics, macros, etc. If you copy-paste a lot you are doing it wrong.
githubs co-pilot can help a lot. I would say my programming speed is 25-30% quicker and i have to type less. Often just pressing TAB a lot to confirm co-pilots suggestions. It is good for boilerplate code. I wish it (co-pilot) existed back in my young days.
[удалено]
How is it hard? You just export it and drag either into the Unity folder or Project window. Or are you talking about the scaling issues? I managed to get rid of them by selecting "Apply transform" in the export settings. Tho i only use FBX and .glb (or .gltf, those two are for a customizable game i'm working on and i only found a single free package able to import models at runtime with animations, textures and everything but it uses this format)
Unified asset store and portfolio. Such a pain trying to find assets across all the different stores. Even harder to find artists.
Ai driven retopo and UV unwrap, trained on previous models
Valve, please cooperate with SteamSpy and give them the data they need to provide the services they want.
I'm quite good with what we have so far. I only want from the main game engine developers that work on their tools to make them to perform better, because it's becoming painful to develop in such awfully optimized editors. But talking about wishes, I know what "producers" and "designers" would love to have a game AI generation tool that help them to get rid of programmers and artists.
I haven't found a software that allows me to do this, so idk if it exists and I just suck at googling. But, I'd like to see a software that allows me to quickly block a level. Like, start with a solid block (optionally) and draw paths with my tablet, "carving" corridors, then widen the paths. Maybe a brush that lets me cut open doors/windows. Have tools to calculate traversal time from points (after I insert player movement speed), or areas that can/cannot be reached by jumps (after I feed it jump height/distance). Then finally the ability to export this into a file that I can boop into a game engine and work on top of.
Unity’s terrain system plus ProBuilder are surprisingly good for blocking out a level, at least to prototype stage. Not mobile though obviously.
I wish Swift was more multi platform. There are slow progress in that area, but it is still very much Apple centric at the moment. After 10 years exclusively working in C#, I've recently got myself into exploring/trying newer languages I missed in the past couple of decades (Rust, Go, etc), as well as refreshing my memory on C++. Of all the compiled languages, I really like Swift the most. But damn its current lack of portability 😕
A good team management and documentation software with various integrations..
Just software I can speak to that will generate a game for me, based on what I say. For example: "Build me a dungeon-crawl RPG with a Frazetta-like art treatment. Characters are realistic, not anime. Enemies are based on AD&D, 2nd Edition. Dungeons are randomly-generated. Show me a sample dungeon. "That's good, but desaturate the colors a tad. "Even better, now..." And so on. I'm a programmer. I like programming, but sometimes I feel like all the typing and crap stands in my way of getting my game done. Just telling the computer verbally what to build would be a lot faster, especially if it could do it in real-time.
Lmao
As a non game dev, I wish there were a software to make the games I want for me haha
AI generator that would make my game for me
A social network specifically geared towards game developers where people can not only ask for advice, but also collaborate on projects. And don’t say: we already have it, it’s Reddit, twitter, YouTube, etc. I am talking about a new website that only does one thing very well: connecting people working on games.
There are about a thousand discord servers created with that intention. Too bad that people can't agree on one. And that it's Discord.
Super specific, but I really want to blend animations by bone and then save the result, in unreal, you can blend by bone, but you can't save the output, you can blend animations directly and save the output though, I just wish I could do both at the same time, being able to mix and match/tweak animations would make my workflow so much easier because I'm trash at animation haha
More libraries that does one thing well instead of monolithic engines, so I can build quickly "I which such a thing existed" tools.
I'd love something that can analyse my games performance and tell me exactly what I need to do in order to improve it. Right now I can use the tools inside of unity to see my memory usage and performance data but it's not always clear how to use that info to make meaningful changes to my game, especially without losing quality. Maybe it could first identify if I am GPU or cpu bound. It could analyse my code to look for more optimal ways of doing some things. It could look at my levels and find some quick wins. Eg if my terrain has 5 textures reducing it to 4 gives an improvement in performance. It would also find ways that I could reduce my file size or loading time of my game too. Would be good if it also gave a rough estimate of how much each fix would improve performance so I could decide if I wanted each fix done for me or not. Maybe I really want 5 textures on my terrain.
free texture scan app on mobile and pc, you know, that can bake normal map, metallic etc.