A piece of advice: Pull the trigger now. Don't make the same mistake as I did
Now, I know this might be a counter-intuitive piece of advice given how we recently had some major product launches that must have caused no small amount of hair-pulling from people who bought a last-gen product weeks before the latest paradigm-shifting new item but please bear with me.
I strongly advise that as soon you have the funds to buy some great components, just go for it. Saving up for a dream-build might seem wise on paper, but it doesn't account for the fact the sometimes life gets in the way.
To illustrate: here's my story
I've been a PC-enthusiast since the mid-90s ever since my dad allowed me to program BASIC on his TRS-80 when I was a boy. But I come from a 3rd-world country, and although my family is not poor, we don't have (and never will have) the kind of disposable income needed to buy a lot of electronics. So when I finally got my hands on a PC, it was nowhere near high-spec even for those days. I constantly fought storage, memory, and processor bottlenecks as I played games and learned how to use Macromedia Flash, C, etc.
I kept telling myself I'll eventually start earning enough money to buy my own PC that would be future-proof, but as a kid and eventually teenager, that was never really a possibility.
Fast forward to college and beyond, and I've never had a PC (laptop or desktop) that I could honestly consider 'good'. They've always been bad-to-mediocre since that's all I could afford.
I decided to just buy stopgap PCs for the time while saving up for my dream-build. This meant I always had a PC, even when I just starting out and not earning a lot, but it also meant I had low-spec, 2nd-hand systems that always eventually failed. Heck, I didn't have a PC with a discrete GPU until 5 years ago.
It's been like that ever since. Whenever I starting saving up money, something always comes up that's more important--rent, utilities, family emergencies, my dad passing away, etc. And since I always already had a PC (just a bad one), I could never justify prioritizing saving up for my dream-build over those other, more essential needs.
Right now (and for the past 5 years), I've been managing with a mishmash system that's built like the Ship of Theseus (i.e. I've replaced every single component at some point). It's a cutting-edge i5-2500 (not overclocked, since I'm on a stock cooler) with 28GB of DDR3. I have around 4TB worth of storage space distributed over 1 SSD (the only brand-new item) and 6 HDDs (that I buy 2nd-hand, and I'm just counting down the days until they die). My GPU is a GTX 650. Everything (except for the SSD) has been salvaged from junk-systems, 2nd-hand buys, etc.
I'm a software engineer and UX designer who also does graphic design. I dabble (and this is my dream) in game design--both computer and tabletop. Having my professional workstation be so out-of-date is really hobbling my productivity. And my game backlog (stuff I planned to play once I had a PC that could do them justice) now includes games that are 15 years old.
I keep saving, but it always makes more financial sense to just buy something middling now (so it can immediately help with my work) than save months' worth of salary to get a high-end component or full system.
Most recently, the money I had earmarked for my dream-build is once again going somewhere else: my mom was just diagnosed with cancer and chemo is expensive. And to top it all off, my country got hit with a typhoon last week and the flood destroyed most of my furniture and appliances.
So yeah. Don't get caught up in waiting and saving for a dream-build.
TL/DR: if you can afford it, pull the trigger now. Stop-gaps are a crutch, and there will never be a perfect opportunity. If you get a windfall, go for it.
submitted by
Katylar to
buildapc
Epic (and Unreal Engine) is part of the Consolization of the PC platform. Alternative? Promote Godot Engine.
Godot is a fully and truly open source Game Engine. It's not just the license cost/cutshare (which is ZERO) but also the complete freedom this Game Engine put in your hands: as customer and as developer itself.
If you're a customer and the game you buy is made with Godot... the product you bought can potentially run seamlessly across all the PC platform ( Linux, Windows, OSX, HTML5) and even mobile: Godot don't impose any limit or restriction to the indie developers you buy from (ie: some Game Engine require extra fee for export to Android).
Its platform agnostic: unlikely Epic reliance to Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo (where most of Fortnite's money come from), Godot is set as a truly independent Game Engine.
Godot team is community funded, and its resuorces are shielded by Software Freedom Conservancy: developers get money on the basis of the work they are actually doing
You can personally review the job they do on daily basis!
http://github.com/godotengine/godot/commits/master (Unreal's github pages is closed door behind an yet-another-license-agreement: also you never know how much of paycheck Epic gets from Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony... which are not exactly PC-as-open-platform-friendly parties).
Unreal Game Engine is trying to pose as what Internet Explorer was in the early '90: Unreal Game Engine.
Godot is basically the "Firefox of the game industry".
Let me give you a small recap of Internet history: more than a decade ago Firefox begun as small project, almost irrelevant compared to Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer was in a dominating position for the Web Industry: it was so big that unilaterally set the web standards such as ActiveX or Macromedia's Flash.
Do you really want Epic to set the future standards for the PC gaming industry?
Epic model's of business is: Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo (again: the parties that signs the Fortnite's paychecks for Xbox, PS4 and Switch)
Think what would be Internet today if Internet Explorer was standard de facto?
TL;DR: supporting Godot against Unreal Game Engine is like would support Firefox against Internet Explorer in later '90 TL;DR(2): tell indie developers to drop Unreal and adopt Godot (like you would tell '90 WebDesigner to drop MS's FrontPage)
submitted by
alexwbc to
pcmasterrace
