What do you use?

You are really lucky to have access to such great software :) Many of us are not so lucky, especially those who are not in the industry, so we get by with what we can. It's not impossible however because there are some cool open source tools out there to help us.

Blender for modeling; Audacity, Ardour, and baudline for audio; GIMP + plugins, UFRaw, digiKam for graphics stuff; Kino for video processing; LyX/LaTeX for typesetting your game manual; Dia for drawing flowcharts, ER diagrams, UML stuff; GnuCash for keeping track of the budget; OpenOffice for spreadsheets, presentations and other office stuff; Eclipse or NetBeans for a general-purpose IDE.

since when is Havok a game engine?

anyways, this is also from a low-budget point of view:

Reaper - audio/music (making thereof)
Blender - modeling, animation, sculpting (not my area of expertise)
GIMP - raster graphics
boost - definitely a necessity for any c++ programming
SFML - 2D graphics, sound, OpenGL framework
Ogre3D - 3D graphics
Bullet - physics

Well Havok is more of a suite I suppose, but I personally use it almost like a game engine, bad term I guess, but then again I think everyone here knew what I meant :p

and yes lightbringer I suppose I am eally lucky, I managed to get into a smal branch of a Xbox Hueg company, who just happens to no believe in limiting our access to the program files (ahem)

I figured id add a bit more to this, since if anything we could have al ist of tried and true sofware going here :p

Google Earth Pro - Great for grabbing ideas and for getting a base, I often use it to go in, angle my view, screensave, then you use an emboss plugin to get the basic shape of it, great for modelling on the quick and dirty :)

Visual Studio (With teh plugins) - Embedded Debugger, COmpiler, IDE, GUI maker, what more do we need?

Modelio - It dynamicly generates C code from Models, one of my favourite tools since I can model my program, and gor directly to the first draft of the code.

IDA Pro, not technicly a game dev item, but since im the all around geek of the place I use it on occasion to update code, and with the hexrays plugin you can go from bianry back to C(ish) pseudocode.

Sorry to sound like a walking commercial, but when I first got into this stuff we were litterally using in house programs and so I think having a list of programs that we think is good is beneficial :)

Lua.... its awesome... and its free....

Decoda, lua debugging environment.

I can't do anything, be it a game or any app with graphics/GUI, a document with figures, or a web page, without Photoshop! =)

- Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition (got it for free at the product launch)
- XNA Game Studio Express
- MS Paint
- Gimp
- Notepad

I might be using these in the near future:
- Lidgren
- JibLibX

I'd like to get my hands on Maya again (took a university class on 3D modelling) but I can't justify spending several thousand dollars on something that I won't be using that often, or for non-commercial purposes.

Of course I've never actually made a game, so take everything I say with a grain of salt...

Right now most of my games used:

- XNA Game Studio (C#)
- Paint.NET
- Photoshop (my brother has it, but I don't so I use Paint.NET instead)
- Audacity

But moving forward I have ideas and hopes to use:

- Direct3D (native C++)
- Unity
- Unreal Development Kit
- Havok (free version on PC)

And I'm thinking about buying Silo for 3D modeling, though the lack of animation has me a bit worried. Maybe I'll just build my own animation software. ;-)

I didn't use too much stuffs. I only use:

3d modeler ----- modeling, animating.
G-force ----- Game Engine, 3D effects.

Both of them are enough.