A sculpture can suddenly break after having chipped away the final piece ( it's called poor planning ). Anyway, at least we've got Ctrl+Z

Bit shocked that there is so little love for the craft. When a artist hammers into his sculpture causing it to break, should he complain that marble isn't strong enough .. or get some more practice?

If you have a good look at the time we spend on programming these days, you will see that most of that time is spent on getting the computer to run the things that we want to make.

Increasing processor speed doesn't change the amount of time it takes to write code.

Faster computers could liberate us from many mundane tasks -work that the computer should be doing for us in the first place.

Computers don't do anything by themselves .. but I guess you're referring to more powerful / higher-level tools.

There's a certain danger to this though. When you for example take a typewriter, it will let you create text faster compared to pen & paper. But it comes at a cost, a typewriter is far less versatile then a pen. Sure you can "hack" a typewriter to do things other then it was originally meant for, but it will control the direction of your product to a degree

I know what you mean though .. you just want to tell a story, but instead you're messing around with empty ink ribbons & jammed type-bars

+ Snyggt game Erik ~

we need computers to become 1000 times faster

.. if you want to be 1000 times lazier when it comes to being creative with code

And the volumetric benefit of Voxels only exists in your head In fact, polygons with 3D textures ( or SSS ) are much more versatile.

It's a lot slower to send 1000 separate 1 polygon objects to the graphics card that a single object made up of 1000 or even 2000 or 3000 polygons!

It depends ( I won't go into detail here ). Under normal circumstances the main performance difference is caused by VBOs, which enables you to store data on the GPU for non-Immediate rendering. However, most engines re-upload the entire mesh as soon as any changes have been made ( which might be applicable for a "growing" environment ), thus losing the performance gain again.

Anyway, the trick is to come up with a algorithm that generates all required variables from only a few parameters ( type, generation etc. + a random seed ). To speed things up you could build lookup-tables for the algorithm ( ex random ) at a reasonable resolution & range, and interpolate between those values.

No price has been announced yet .. and the Beta version is free. Anyway, Unity is a solid choice

Correct 3DVIA Studio was previously known as Virtools MP.

Unity is a solid choice. But if you really want visual scripting, take a look at 3DVIA Studio*

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Bnynse1WOw

*Be aware that they don't allow standalone publishing while they are still in Beta

From my experience a surprising (?) large portion of game developers don't play games regularly. In fact, a majority probably is more passionate about their creative pastime ( writing / composing / photography etc. ) then consuming video-games.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gew68Qj5kxw