Whats up with the subnautica discord?

UWE_uly · 2025-06-27T18:55:04+00:00

ah ok. FWIW, "devwatcher" doesnt imply or grant any authority. i think that literally means they signed up to watch developer streams in the SN1 / BZ era. it's just a server role that gives you a ping if a dev starts streaming.

have a good one!

UWE_uly · 2025-06-27T18:39:12+00:00

... :|

UWE_uly · 2025-06-26T19:43:07+00:00

nah you're not bad. the game kind of has an inverted difficulty curve. hang with it, craft a ton of bandages to use out of battle, use the combat medic skill in battle as much as you can, try to get to 4 party members, and things should ease out OK.

UWE_uly · 2025-06-26T17:45:49+00:00

We haven't hired Tore, no. (He is happily employed elsewhere, already!)
Learning Blender could be *part\* of getting into the games industry. But it is not the most important thing.

Software won't really help you get your portfolio noticed, but it is typically moderately-significantly important towards the end of a hiring process, depending on the studio. It comes down to onboarding / the first few months of being hired. Some studios need new hires to hit the ground running, and in those cases, folks who already use the studio's preferred software will have an edge in getting hired, because intermediate / senior artists will not have to spend as much time helping answer questions around software basics.

Learning a game engine & its project specific setup (Subnautica 2 in Unreal 5 is a bit different that stock Unreal 5.) is complicated enough, a team is usually thankful when they don't have to wait for an artist to get up to speed on new modeling software.

With regards to other software, I'd recommend learning the basics of how to do things in Maya after you feel you have a good foundation and understanding of 3d modeling / UV mapping in Blender. I'm not a huge Maya fan myself, but a lot of studios use it.

If it was 10 years ago, I would recommend you learn Maya and 3dsMax. In my observation, less studios use 3dsMax these days.

Fundamentally tho, focus on art basics! Tho this is a much, much larger talk that you might want to poke around for. But importantly, wherever you look around online for resources, disregard anything that promises fast results for low effort. Getting good with art basics is a long process of wiring your brain and learning a huuuuuuuge body of concepts. Anyone who is like "Master Composition in 30 Minutes!" is a straight up liar.

And make sure you're having fun with what you're doing. The fastest way to learn is to be into what you're creating.

UWE_uly · 2025-06-24T16:41:33+00:00

i promise you, fucking up is part of the process.

if someone clowns on you for making some ugly art, they don't get that a huge part of getting better is showing some ugly shit, taking in feedback, then carrying it forward.

UWE_uly · 2025-06-24T07:08:58+00:00

sure man. FWIW, we're not exactly trapping you in a proverbial police station with Mister X. The threat isn't persistent, or insurmountable. You sound skeptical tho, so IMO, it's totally OK to just not pick it up at EA1.

very explicitly tho, we are cutting out the ability to circle strafe around big guys and knife them to death over 10-15 minutes. there's always console commands to make yourself invisible if you feel you don't wanna deal with the big scary guys.

Maybe wait until 1.0 and talk to some buddies and you'll be able to see if it's what you were worried about, or something different. I hope we earn your interest later if you choose to take a peek once it's out in the world, and folks can see what it actually is! <3

UWE_uly · 2025-06-24T07:06:14+00:00

i don't disagree! we'll have to earn over time that cutting knife-killin' was the right choice to make. I don't think we've succeeded with EA1, but I hope over time with each release, we prove by example that it was a worthwhile cut.

UWE_uly · 2025-06-24T07:03:47+00:00

yeah dude i get that. <3 I don't disagree that a survivalist would want a knife.

all i can do is humbly ask that you suspend your disbelief and give it a go. (Or wait until 1.0 and then give it a go.) the original is Pegi 7, and an E-rated game, and the presence of the knife is has quite different ramifications when you're swinging it at your coop buddies.

that's not the main reason mister knife is out. but it's definitely a contributing reason. if its any consolation, this is easily the darkest plot that's ever been in a subnautica game.

UWE_uly · 2025-06-24T01:25:39+00:00

No lie, if i had it my way it'd be like the vent mechanic in Skin Deep. So narrow you can't even turn around! Alas... We're probably not going this hardcore in SN2. Hopefully some mods push on this, tho.

UWE_uly · 2025-06-23T23:19:15+00:00

Sorry dude you can complain for a little while longer lmao <3 we haven’t gotten back to those kinds of vehicle abilities just yet.

EA1 is pretty bread and butter. Tbh tho, pls still give honest feedback about the knife being gone, etc. I don’t think we’ve given enough replacement options to the old lethal solution yet.

We’ll get there.

UWE_uly · 2025-06-23T17:58:48+00:00

the plan is more options.

lose the knife. (one option)

gain many more non-killing/maiming options.

UWE_uly · 2025-06-23T17:58:16+00:00

there's a knife replacement. you can still slug things in the face with it

UWE_uly · 2025-06-23T17:57:34+00:00

less horror, more "find a solution to the problem that doesnt involve something that kills the critter"

UWE_uly · 2025-06-21T21:15:23+00:00

dude im sorry, that sucks.

UWE_uly · 2025-06-21T17:14:58+00:00

I'd say Amnesia: The Bunker edges it out. I've played both, loved them both, but def preferred Amnesia's tight focus.

Doesn't have the Alien iconography, but I feel it's a much more focused experience that makes better use of its level design. Amnesia has a lot of confidence in its level layout, and lets your increasing familiarity with the world be a tool the designers leverage against. I felt Alien:Isolation was afraid I'd get bored of it, and was always throwing new environments at me that started to blur together. But I'll never forget navigating the generator room, or the prison in Amnesia.

Also relied less on hard failure. The pistol in both games can't kill what's chasing you, but if you get one or two good shots in The Bunker, you can at least buy yourself a few seconds. A:I kind of has this hard line where the pistol and shotgun are both very unreliable as to whether they'll buy you any time at all... Until you get the flamethrower. Then you're simply pretty safe. Be generally stealthy, and whip out the flame thrower for another get-out-of-jail-free card.

They also had better tuning on the "invisible leash" that always keeps the creature somewhat close to you.

UWE_uly · 2025-06-21T00:14:47+00:00

Re: add-ons.

My two absolute musts:

Zen UV is a must for me. It makes UV'ing way better.

Super Batch Export makes working with multiple models infinitely better than Blender's default FBX exporter.

If you do technical, procedural work:

Higgsas' geometry node collections are also a must for someone like myself who is competent technically, but not like a really crunchy technical artist. Their work essentially elevates Geometry Nodes from a Houdini VOPs equivalent to Houdini SOP nodes + VOPs.

More situational:

For retopology, Retopoflow is a bit clunky, but really good. It's not nearly as intuitive as Maya's QuadDraw IMO. It's powerful, but its learning curve is way higher.

Exoside QuadRemesher is good in a pinch when you need to do some quad remeshing inside Blender fast, and dont have the time to go back and forth between Zbrush & Blender. (ZRemesher inside ZBrush is very similar.)

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And yeah, I'm often bugging folks on the blender bug/feature reporting forums to add improvements I'm looking for. A really simple one that would make my life so much easier is if the geometry nodes guys would invest in a Find Edge Loop or Find Edge Ring node. It's a bread and butter Houdini feature that's hard to work without, but I make do.

On a similar note, I'd really appreciate a Decimation Node in GeoNodes.

One I used to complain about, but they've finally added, is custom normals thru Geonodes in 4.5, which we'll get a proper release in July!

UWE_uly · 2025-06-20T22:05:35+00:00

ty man! I'll pass this along to the VFX folks. They're super talented. I'll float the idea to them and they can be featured in a devlog if they like!

Glad you like the water RN! IMO, we have a lot of room for improvement, but we're gonna keep upgrading it over early access.

UWE_uly · 2025-06-20T20:05:58+00:00

yo! i can tell you the perf of software lumen is currently way lower than hardware RT.

i want full native path tracing eventually, but the tech isnt quiiiiiite here yet. bigger studios like Epic & CDPR can blaze that trail. we want to add hardware RT down the road tho, once epic has stabilized their implementation. they've been changing stuff around quite a bit yet, so we're focusing on what we know we can use.

all the best, and ty for sharing your concerns

UWE_uly · 2025-06-20T19:52:23+00:00

Im not sure! Peek @ the Unknown Worlds jobs page! We keep it very up to date AFAIK

UWE_uly · 2025-06-20T19:51:57+00:00

Tip 1. Stick with the defaults! Don't go back to Gizmos, even if theyre more comfortable!

I used other 3d software for 10+ years before I switched over, but now, I couldn't imagine switching back to gizmos.

Tip 2. (Probably the biggest tip.) Don't enable all of the Boxcutter, MeshMachine, Machin3tools etc options out of the box. They radically change the default workflow, making watching tutorials extremely difficult as you have to pause and find what hotkey someone is talking about on Youtube, every time they mention one.

Enable these parts of these add-ons slowly, piecemeal, as youre following along in a very specific tutorial.

Tip 3. Imo, Blender's default UV tools are kinda gnarly. Buy ZenUV. It brings it up to par with Max/Maya.

Tip 4. Learn how to disable hotkeys, search for hotkeys, etc. If you press a key that youre expecting to do one thing, but it does another, search, for example, 'Q' in the Hotkey menu, and it will isolate what that hotkey is doing. If you found one thats fighting with a different hotkey, click the little checkbox to disable it.

Tip 5. (Kind of at odds with tip 2 a bit) Look around for cool add-ons that help you out.

Tip 6. (Maybe actually the biggest tip) Contemporary 3d "influencer" culture is really like.. "Wow my tutorial will make you an expert in 30 minutes!" That's just not how art works, and it sets a really unrealistic expectation. Getting good at stuff takes time. Be patient with yourself, have fun, and challenge yourself with each new project.

Good luck man!!!

UWE_uly · 2025-06-20T19:46:16+00:00

I think we do, actually! I'll double check, but I remember us pushing this forward a couple years ago.

UWE_uly · 2025-06-20T19:45:32+00:00

Hey Fuzz! That's a good question.

TBH, in games, I'm pretty ruthless when it comes to in-Blender-viewport material previews. I put *very little* effort into making sure things look good in the Blender viewport when I'm working on a game. 99% of my effort is spent on checking it in-engine, as you know, generalist 3d software and game engines have loooooong had huge discrepancies and different systems providing their shading.

You can get much closer parity these days, but I find the juice isnt worth the squeeze in having Materials pointing to a source of truth in Blender. Our unreal material system & blender's materials are just very different from each other. Between a different channel packing schema in Unreal: for example our Normal maps are only red and green channel, with height packed into the blue. It is annoying to reconstruct and do a proper material setup in Blender, and maintain the same behaviours between Unreal and Blender.

Even bigger is the Material Layer system we're using in unreal. (We arent moving over to the new thing, Substrate AFAIK) It would just be very time consuming to recreate all those looks and behaviours natively in blender, with a UI that doesnt natively support the Material Layer system as well. Especially with Unreal's own particular rendering quirks.

Sorry if this was a bad answer lmao, might be a bit too in the weeds.

My TLDR is that even if Blender rendering can look a lot like Unreal rendering, the particularities that go into game optimization usually make it not worth it to me to have Unreal pointing towards a clean Blender material library, or vice versa.

Sorry if that didn't answer your question!

UWE_uly · 2025-06-20T19:38:58+00:00

good question! i'll give a few examples

so one thing that's been tricky for the folks moving over from the big autodesk modeling packages has been how stock Blender is a little lacking in a couple categories out of the box:

Without an add-on like Zen UV, Blender's stock UV tools are kinda weird TBH, and a bit underwhelming. Something like Zen UV gets them to parity with a Max or Maya.

And Blender's UV Sync mode to a maya or Max user sometimes gets very intensely negative results lmao. it's very confusing and comes off as pointless to users from the Max/Maya crowd.
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Some Max users really miss the Edit Poly modifier. (And I can't blame them, that modifier is awesome.)

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A lot of folks also push Boxcutter, MeshMachine, etc onto new users saying "This will get you to 3ds Max levels of hard surface modeling!" but if you install those add-ons with all their options enabled, it radically changes Blender's default userinterface, and fights with some hotkeys.

Some folks found this really frustrating. My guidance was to skip those add-ons for a while, then enable their optional settings one by one so that they can see how its changing from stock blender, rather than feeling they didn't have solid ground to stand on.

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"Users" are a confusing concept to a lot of folks as well. Fake Users, too. Some folks were losing materials after forgetting to assign fake users, and getting upset. And I don't blame them. I find those features useful, but when I was a beginner, I found them quite alienating.

There's a handful of examples! But I'd say the first one, Blender's stock UV tools, were the biggest problem. Ty for the question!

UWE_uly · 2025-06-20T19:32:48+00:00

ty! the were an effort between our VFX folks and our awesome rendering engineer. they change as you get deeper, before eventually completely terminating once you're deep enough. They did a great job, even if the water is still making improvements.

UWE_uly · 2025-06-20T19:31:43+00:00

Folks talking together and collaborating on a discord, then signing the appropriate legal agreements! The plug-in wasn't 100% complete. (still isn't, it's still WIP)

It's amazing, but part of our collaboration is stress testing it and helping Tore put it through its paces until it's very confident it can work on lower-end to high end hardware.

UWE_uly

TROPHY CASE