24th December 2003, 7:54 PM
Let's just say I don't have a lot of faith in free stuff from commercial America. Maya is freaking huge, and you said yourself they only cover a small part of MEL. They cannot cover all of Maya in 70 hours, and a good book will cover all of Maya. Also, MEL is nothing compared to Direct X or Open GL- it is used as an extension to those APIs. As I said before, Maya is fantastic. But it is a program for animation- and that makes it for artists. No, I didn't read all about it- I tried but the link didn't work. I looked around on that forum for a few minutes but didn't find anymore helpful info before posting my first reply. So I assumed that since they are teaching Maya, this whole thing is aimed at artists and aspiring programmers.
Demon, you can't really believe that someone can walk into a game studio and apply for a software engineer position with just this. Modding a game, no matter how powerful the mod, is not programming. You know that too. That's like these script kiddies who follow some step by step instructions on how to use someone else's programs to crack a Windows box- and then claiming they are master hackers. It's bogus, and anybody who really is in the industry will see through it. The people at Valve and Ubisoft may have used another game engine and maybe it was something a lot like this, but they also had the ability and knowlege to do more than just add new weapons. If you use a year old game engine, don't you have a graphically dated game? Yes, unless you can push and expand and build on top of the engine to make something a lot better. That requires real programming experience.
As I said before, it's a nice start, but without a solid foundation in programming, plus Open GL and DirectX and a lot of time coding in all that, you won't go anywhere. If you've looked at jobs that are listed on places like gamedev.net, you will see that not only do they all want a CS degree or equivalent experience, plus at least one published game. I don't think this will count. That's why I have this opinion.
Demon, you can't really believe that someone can walk into a game studio and apply for a software engineer position with just this. Modding a game, no matter how powerful the mod, is not programming. You know that too. That's like these script kiddies who follow some step by step instructions on how to use someone else's programs to crack a Windows box- and then claiming they are master hackers. It's bogus, and anybody who really is in the industry will see through it. The people at Valve and Ubisoft may have used another game engine and maybe it was something a lot like this, but they also had the ability and knowlege to do more than just add new weapons. If you use a year old game engine, don't you have a graphically dated game? Yes, unless you can push and expand and build on top of the engine to make something a lot better. That requires real programming experience.
As I said before, it's a nice start, but without a solid foundation in programming, plus Open GL and DirectX and a lot of time coding in all that, you won't go anywhere. If you've looked at jobs that are listed on places like gamedev.net, you will see that not only do they all want a CS degree or equivalent experience, plus at least one published game. I don't think this will count. That's why I have this opinion.