The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

Chivalry 2 might be the first PvP game I’ve enjoyed playing since the 90’s. The fact that the weapons are all slow and it’s deliberately a bit silly suits me quite well

Highly recommend these Silent Wings 3 fans BTW. I replaced all the stock NZXT fans Marie’s had in her case for years with these (and a 140mm on top) and they’re stupidly quiet (even without the optional anti-vibration mounts), and cheaper than Noctua versions

I refuse to throw away this set of 4 suction cups, I have no idea where they came from but somehow they feel useful & don’t take up much space. At worst they’re an amusing thing to find every few years. Also, does Germany make the best suction cups or something? 🤔

Of course I still have a brand new sealed 2009 era 600W PSU because why wouldn’t you?

This is from when I’d seen a couple of PSUs die in succession & as the most likely component to fail I couldn’t afford to be unable to work (freelancing) even for a few days so I kept a backup

I’m just like my Grandad except for him it was old tools & busted up radios. Although I still have a couple of his tools he gave me, they must be 50 years old and are still fine, a longevity this old 600W spare PSU that I’m holding on to for some reason is unlikely to match

I’ve run out of space in my PC spares storage again, which means I have to do the unthinkable and get rid of something I know I’ll probably never need, but am convinced that I will soon after I dispose of it 😭 (based on that one or two times it genuinely happened)

And it works for inputs too, drag backwards from what you need in the function to the input node 🤯

Wish I'd known about this way to add return values to functions a bit earlier #UnrealEngine

Found this in some old code and laughed

I love my UE master material system with its static switch params for features but now when I want to add something to it the shader compile overhead when saving is pretty brutal, takes ages as well as making the editor chew over 12GB of RAM. 😬

It didn’t used to be this bad, I’m guessing this gets worse the more material instances you add?

The trouble with UE is I could easily spend half my time just learning about all the in-built systems. I just brushed the surface of the Gameplay Ability System and I feel like it would be super useful if I could find the time to understand it properly

So the upshot is: UMG ticks always regardless of pause state, even during editor pause. Delta Time is always real time; again even while the editor is paused! A bit unintuitive at first but I guess it kinda makes sense. So Delays are no use and you have to do your own IsPaused/Time Dilation check if you need to respect game time

I was using a delay in UMG because I wanted something to stay on screen until an event happens, or for a minimum amount of time (whichever is longer). So when the event happens, if not enough time has passed I Delay for the difference.

Except if you hit the Editor pause in the middle of that delay (I was trying to debug the alignment of an element in that intermediate time), the next node immediately kicks in and the element animates out, despite everything being supposedly paused 🤔

Ouch, only just realised that using a Delay node in UMG is a really, really bad idea. When the game is paused the next node just executes immediately and ignores the delay. Seems like if a delay is currently ongoing when you pause, the post-delay execution immediately fires?

The UE Common UI plugin's Numeric Text widget is nice. I like that it has an "Interpolate To Value" function for that typical count-up/down animation rather than jumping to values, very convenient.

So many games add card systems these days, which adds this min/maxing mechanic to everything. People must like it I guess but it leaves me cold. It also explains why in pen & paper RPGs I’m never the guy who has wrung out every mechanical advantage out of the system, often the opposite

I think I’ve figured out why I don’t like some games other people rave about: I don’t like making “builds”. I really don’t enjoy having a huge possibility space and trying to optimise and carve synergies out of it. It feels like work to me.

OTOH I love Roguelites which have a large possibility space but give me only a fraction of it in each run & I have to adapt & figure out how to make it work

I don't know if anyone will find this useful but having tinkered with my Rider/C++/UE coding colour scheme a fair amount I figured I'd make it public in case it's of use to anyone else. It's based on Monokai Pro, but with a bunch of tweaks

https://gist.github.com/sinbad/582dd3fb96b20fdfb8deeeae0ba66419

Another blog to share here from my archives, which I needed to refer to myself yesterday: Skyboxes in #UnrealEngine, how they work and how to make them.

Surprisingly there's very little documentation about these, given how common the need for them is, so that's why I wrote it https://www.stevestreeting.com/2021/04/06/skyboxes-in-ue4/