Recent reviews by M

Addictive.

SpEn has a lot to it. It's an amazing world with absolute player's freedom of activities. I remember thousands great in-game moments, where I was having fun with friends. SpEn could be my most favourite game for the whole my lifetime, but...

But gameplay development isn't thought out. KSH introduces what seems the most fun and arcade for them. Once upon the time they even introduced randomly spawning and exploding dogs, with no backthought of, for example, instead using coders for redesigning communications to be more comfortable and fun to play with, or implementing just a simple volumetric map.

Then multiplayer, the reason of this game should be even played, experiencing hundreads of different player-made environments with old- and new-made friends, it's completely dead. The whole netcode, server and data management were randomly put up together, occasionly breaking down and falling apart with whole dedicated servers almost every weak, even though those servers are being hosted sometimes on huge mainframes.

And physics. Oh... Those were crashing, exploding, lagging out, torning apart thousands and thousands of my ships, I've been working on for many weeks, for all these 3 years. Pulling run out of power ships against the gravity from ground to the stratosphere, insta-killing my characters million times, who just stepped in the wrong time in the wrong place, breaking out of sync - those are just dumb ways to die.

The most fun part is that, devs say, they are fixing physics and multiplayer, that they are making a progress. Well, I believed them for the last 3 years until now. And now I'm just too tired to continue holding on these hopings.

I saw felt so far no code improvements or reworks even by a tiny bit for the last year. Every single 'fix' of every single older bug just pops out bunch of newer bugs. It's the product of coder's lazyness to go deeper in their own code, I suppose. I'm not kidding, coding proccess is really awful. Sometimes I even think, coders put bugs in on purpose, to just fix them later, for the work proccess imitation.

Why is it so? Well, my guess is, teamwork has became hulking. KSH grown out in a bigger studio, but it's leading style stayed as small-team one, which is unable to control or monitor coding forces with required flexibility.

It feels painful to give it thumbs down for the game with this variety of features, because they are ruined for the comfortability of players experience by some primitive management issues.

Blender is user-friendly, it has high perfomance, modeling is really fast (though, some of this fastness comes from user-made addons), and, what's most important, - it's free.

But despite of everything above, Blender is underrated in industry for no real reason.

Or, I may guess, it's underrated because Blender's learning curve is merciful, which leads to a huge number of artists with undeveloped skills, who don't really want to become professionals. This kind of community creates a stereotype around an app itself as well.

Now, talking about the cons: simulations are quite bad for animation purposes, rigging is a little nightmare, in-built texturing is kind of painful as well, sculpting isn't based on voxels - it sometimes creates artifacts. Some are quality-of-life features are missing (e.g. rotating view in image editor or offsetting edge loop). But all these things are not critical, as you often can find user-made addons to compensate for them, or even make your own addon with a little bit of Python knowledge.

IMO, if you want to make masterpieces, it's better not to use Blender solely for everything. It's power is mostly in modeling and raytracing rendering engine. Combine this great-great power with, I dunno, PS, SP, Houdini, 3d Coat, etc.

I'm off now.