May Contain Nuts

Despite my ruminations on getting an iPod Touch earlier this month, I have yet to get one because it’s still a bit tough to justify spending $400 on a music player at the moment. However, circumstances have conspired to make it possible for me to spend a considerable amount of effort developing games on my G5. This, of course, requires me to have access to a computer running Windows that is also capable of running 3DS MAX. At present, there are three systems in this house, and the only one fitting that bill is my wife’s PC, which pretty much rules it out as a work machine for me.

So, with a heaping helping of “thank you sir, may I have another?”, I trudged my aging refurbished Dell laptop over to the aging refurbished Dell online store to look at the offerings. I feel very bad about doing this, because I’m looking at systems I’m likely to outgrow in a relatively short time span, and on top of that, I’m looking at PCs (rather than Intel-based Macs), and on top of that, I’m looking at Dells. However, I simply don’t have the time to spend saving up enough money to buy a decent Mac (or even a Mac mini, even a refurbished one), and the sole purpose of this machine is to run MAX anyway, so getting a Mac for the purpose of booting it exclusively into Windows seems a bit stupid.

Ultimately, I settled on a rather nice dual-core AMD 64 at 2GHz with a gig of RAM, and integrated GeForce 6150, and Vista Home Premium (because I enjoy torture, but not enough to subject myself to Home Basic) for $229, which is almost as cheap as a new license of Vista Home Premium at retail. Crazy. It’s hardly the most awesome machine on the market, to be sure, but it’s still light-years ahead of my laptop (whose display driver crashes when I try using MAX for more than 10 minutes), and even ahead of the 4-year-old PC my wife has, to a certain extent. I wanted to get a model with 2 gigs of RAM, but they weren’t going for less than $349, and I couldn’t justify spending even that much right now. It’s sad, I know, but we’re trying to pay off debt and save money at the same time, so it’s a little rough at times, and the truck’s coming up on some expensive required maintenance.

I’m happy I’ll be getting a system I can run MAX on uninterrupted and unhindered, but it also irks me that I’ve delved into the dark underworld of bargain-basement PCs again - and refurbished bargain basement PCs at that. Still, Dell’s sort of the lesser of three equally evil evils by way of familiarity (at least my laptop hasn’t experienced that many issues in its 4 year lifespan, which is far more than can be said for the two Gateways my aunts subjected themselves to, regrettably at my recommendation), and it’s also the best deal I could find on a baseline system, so I jumped at it. It’s not like I need a graphics powerhouse to do realtime game asset creation, after all.

My thoughts on the new workflow are as follows:

• Everything needs to be stored on the Mac hard drive for Unity to be able to open it and include it in the project. Any new files or other updates are automatically detected and imported on the fly. It’s pretty flippin’ sweet.
• Unity will be running on the G5 for obvious reasons. All final scene assembly and scripting will be done on the G5.
• 3DS MAX will be running on the Dell. I’d like to Remote Desktop into the Dell so I can run everything on the same screen with no switching, but it depends on how well the speed works out. All files will be saved over the network to the G5 for Unity to import.
• Photoshop will be running on the G, and again, all assets will be saved to Unity’s project directory for ease of use. I can bop between MAX on the PC and Photoshop on the Mac really quickly if RDC works out, and again, MAX will be drawing and stuffing everything from/to the Unity project folder on the Mac, so running PS on the Mac is a nice way to save PC resources.

The Dell is on 5-day shipping, so hopefully next weekend I can get the whole mess up and running, and get everything squared away for some content development next weekend (or at least, a workflow demonstration should Oscy’s parents make it up for a visit). In the meantime, I should probably wrap up development on DPWR and get it upgraded, or I may never actually see the light of day again.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 22nd, 2007 at 1:20 am and is filed under Computing, Game Development, Hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.