Enrique Page

This is precisely the reason why I wanted to use Houdini, paid for the license and then found out I couldn't do it. This happened to me almost 2 years ago and they were already looking into it back then.

I just came back here from the steam page once I noticed they had indie licenses over there now; i was hoping this issue would have been cleared by now but apparently we still can't use the engine to generate in real-time.

I've already stated this somewhere in the forums, but for game development this almost defeats 80% of the convenience of using Houdini.

I can think of the top of my head of a workflow that would allow me to work almost in the same way that the Houdini Engine for games is usually used for but in Blender (particularly if you're using Sverchok) and Blender is free.

Being able to move a slider in the editor to change the look of an asset is convenient but really if it can't be done in real-time then there's no point in spending the money on a license from the indie perspective, Blender can offer similar workflows without the need to learn a completely different software in paradigms to most of the 3D software out there(like Houdini) and can also leverage Houdini's paradigms through plugins such as Sverchok which albeit aren't as efficient as Houdini's nodes but once again probably good enough considering the price difference in comparison to the advantages offered by the Houdini Engine.

Just as we don't have the man power to design 1000 chairs, we don't have the will to move 10000 sliders.

The point of using Houdini is the proceduralism itself, and not being able to leverage this to our advantages in real-time is the ONLY reason why I still use Blender as my sole 3D editor after all these years in modeling.

I thought Houdini was my thing, and unfortunately it kinda really is, but this one detail just disables its utility in my specific scenario.


If you can work around not being able to leverage this in real-time then more power to u, but I am the kind of guy who doesn't really see a big benefit in speed just from having editor control over an asset's look; sure it can always be convenient but I'm just not sure I'll leverage THAT enough.

As a one man team it's hard to code and design everything yourself, and proceduralism helps you tackle this. Not if you can't do it in real-time though, since even the task of building all those levels by hand is daunting enough, let alone designing the assets one by one.




Pls SideFX, Houdini is the best - don't limit it in such ways… I really wanna get a license again but I can't bring myself to bare this single fact.


You have an engine that could change the entire industry, particularly in a time where it's clear this is the future.

Why not make the big move now? You'd make a lot more cash and secure the indie market imo, if only devs knew they could use your engine in this way.

Hello guys!!

So I'm relatively new to Houdini, and originally got into it because of it's procedural functionality (I come from a slightly technical background) since I figured I would be able to simply run the Houdini Engine directly through my game's builds - this however seems not to be the case - limiting the functionality of the Houdini Engine to the Editor itself.

This seems to be a big problem to me since I had built most of my tools with the idea in mind that I would later be altering the parameters of these with random functions at runtime (in order to have a “procedural world”).

I read on the forums that this is something that the SideFX team is seriously looking into since they are aware of how limiting this might end up being for indie developers - my concern is whether this is still being looked into or not - since I saw this on a few posts but all of these were at least a year old.


I would really appreciate an update on the matter since I was building this game for my thesis, which I have to submit this semester (meaning that if Houdini will still not be able to do what I intended it to do for my project by the time I have to submit it, I'm gonna have to rethink the whole idea).


thank you so much in advance for any details you guys can give me,

I really appreciate it!


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Enrique

Amazing how fast you guys are suggesting things. I'm glad the support is so good because I really want to stick with Houdini.

I am back at home now where I still have an older version of Houdini (the different computers I've been experiencing this crash on back in college are all up to date). I've tried reproducing the crashes back at home and I am not getting any so everything seems to be fine here.

I know Houdini was working fine in these college computers I just mentioned 2 or 3 months ago since I didn't have these problems and I know they haven't changed the GPUs but I can check as soon as I am able to meet with our technician to see what they're running and what the drivers are to give you guys more information.


The steps to reproduce are really simply splitting any pane. That by itself crashed or froze Houdini (in these College computers). The same would occur after a few minutes of using it even if I didn't split the pane tab, but essentially just splitting the panes would freeze the program or crash it, even on a new file, with nothing on it yet. I split the panes with both the interface and with keyboard commands and both methods presented the same problem although for some reason somehow using keyboard commands seemed to generate longer periods of freezing.

Thank you so much for your support and will keep you up to date about the subject