Tools of the trade

I was just wondering what some of the tools that people here use for game design, art work, programming, etc?

Here's some of the things I use, or have been trying to get proficient at:

Notepad++
At my heart I'm a programmer, so I've got a softspot in my heart for Notepad++ . Great little text editor for scripts, css files, etc.

Unity
A pretty handy 3D game engine. There's a steep learning curve, and not everything always works like it should, but at the price of free, it makes it so you can build things pretty easily. I've never built a game with outside assets I've built myself yet, though.

Blender
A great free 3D modeling program. Pretty steep learning curve, but once you get it, you can do almost anything with it.

Visual Studio .NET
I use VS for all of my programming, from web design to hopefully someday application or mobile app development. Pretty steep price tag, if you're doing things professionally, though.

Photoshop. It's a little known known program used for making graphics.

I definitely use Blender too for 3D. I'm starting to use 3DS Max here but I haven't done any 3D yet at my internship. I was also using sculptris for high res 3D stuff. I want to try out Zbrush too.

Paint Tool Sai is my painting program of choice. A lot nicer to paint in than Photoshop but not as deep as Corel Painter. The interface is a million times better than Painter though.

I also found out that The Gimp was useful today for making ICO files pretty easily.

I often use Fireworks more than Photoshop (CS2), but I just find it easier to use. I'm hoping to learn Blender soon, and start work on Unity.

Ryudo wrote:

In retard terms so someone like me can understand. What is the real difference in these engines? (also note if about to use a Car analogy I know jack shit about them )

I know PS & GIMP as I have gimp. Just never figured much of what it can do. Unity I know basically is a engine as a nice cheaper alt to 2 million for let's say Cry Engine. That said I still don't understand.

I may run the site and know much about gaming....development side of things I'm in the dark. So curious to know more. Who knows I may have a calling I never knew about.

Different engines can have different layouts, some easier than others, and can also provide different features. Unity for free, for example, does not allow dynamic shadowing.

I don't even know the major differences between a lot of these things because they're pretty complex and I haven't worked with much directly. But what Frozen said is correct.