Venting Off Some Steam

I'm so fucking tired of having to teach myself design tools. Earlier tonight I felt like getting some hands on experience with fps level design, since I don't have HL2:EP1, I can't use Hammer, so I reinstalled Unreal Tournament 2K4, spent some time re-aquainting myself with the game's style pace and weapons, then opened UnrealEd. Holy fucking shit people, can you make a program any more intimidating on first opening. What happened to the days of Starcraft map editor where if you just wanted to build something incredibly fucking basic it didn't take a degree in nuclear fucking physics.

Okay so I'm clicking in the workspace and it's just moving the viewport around, grand. I manage to make something... fuck all idea what, but supposedly some sort of terrain object. Well gee, camera tool makes things pan, lets try the vertex editing tool, that way I can grab vertices and drag them around... and queue several minutes of me dragging the camera around to no effect on the fucking object. Greaaaat. So online I go. Atari's forums have an entire section set aside for 2003/4 editing, awesome. Stickies, even more awesome. Every tutorial being a broken link, not awesome.

And I wouldn't fucking care if it wasn't the same damn shit every fucking time. "Hey everybody we have this great new engine," well awesome, I'll check it out and suffer from your incomplete wiki and nonsensical tutorials and shitty code commenting. Fucking awesome. Hey want to move a sprite forward at a speed of .00025 milimeters a second? Well then now's your chance to take a refresher course in trigonometry! Don't have seventeen years of C++ under your belt? That's okay, every scripting on language on Earth throws all those conventions painfully ingrained into your consciousness to the wind and feels just fine making you learn an entirely new syntax to do all the exact same shit.

Better hope you learn well from reading shit on forums, and like asking questions of random forum strangers. Maybe if you're really lucky you'll get to catch them on IRC and deal with them pontificating their opinions on the merit of your present goal without any fucking clue what the hell it is you're trying to make.

*sigh* I'm just tired right now. Physically tired, and tired of fighting the same fucking battle all the time. I'm sure if I just spent more time with any particular sets of tools it'd eventually become as easy to use as Maya is for me now. But god damn, every time I want to start on something it's some new fucking two year project just to get to the point where the fucking tools are usable.

And the Aurora toolkit, which I was finally starting to get, crashes every god damn time as of last patch and they are NEVER going to fix it.