@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place
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sinbad

@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

Greybeard. I’ve made engines (Ogre3D), devtools (Sourcetree, Git LFS), now games, Unreal Engine tools & plugins. Baker, coffee nerd, Cat Dad. He/him

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sinbad, to random
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If the tech industry wants to impress me maybe just once they could come up with new fad that doesn’t involve pissing enormous amounts of energy and water and CO2 budget up the wall for larks

Just feck off with all this junk that makes all of the real problems of this century worse

sinbad, to random
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It's a bit rough and ready but I bashed out a bit of documentation for SUSS today. I only realised while writing it just how much there was to talk about and how I didn't have time to do it properly. This will have to do for now, as much as I enjoy working on documentation I really have to get on with other things next week https://github.com/sinbad/SUSS

sinbad,
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I now consider SUSS (Steve's UtilityAi SubSystem for ) to be a decent Alpha (I've even tagged it!). It's behaving quite nicely in our game and while I'm sure there's more to improve, I'm pretty confident that it's usable for those happy to take the plunge.

I only started it about 2 months ago and it's my first foray into Utility AI, so you know, buyer* beware 😛

https://github.com/sinbad/SUSS

*(for the low low price of zero dollarydos)

djlink, to random
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Well I guess they finally broke it enough that I can't use it, so my undecision of "I'm still kinda checking it but maybe I shouldn't" has been made for me xD

sinbad,
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@djlink oh well 🙃

sinbad, to random
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I think out of all the Star Wars stories, The Bad Batch had the best overall story arc. Bittersweet but perfect ending.

sinbad,
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@TTimo I was fine with that. Ventress popping in to solve all their problems Jedi style would have undermined it IMO when it was really about 3 battered clones barely limping over the finish line with their comrades and Omega coming to the fore

sinbad,
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@poetaster I wasn’t a fan

sinbad,
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@poetaster no, I enjoyed that (earlier seasons more). I found the Fett series a bit dull

fuzzybinary, to random
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Can any console game devs give me some insight on the state of using Rust on consoles? My understanding is that Unreal has replaced some code with Rust, so it must be doable yes?

sinbad,
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@aeva @fuzzybinary There was a 3rd party effort to integrate it a couple of years ago but I don’t think it went anywhere.

I think this is good reading if you’re considering getting into it https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev/. I get the impression that people using Rust for gamedev are in danger of prioritising love for Rust over gamedev productivity

sinbad, to random
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I've got a "bug": my skeleton crossbowman does this crazy spray shot attack sometimes & stumbles backwards, and if you go round a corner while he's doing it he'll lose track of you. He'll investigate the spot he saw you just before shooting but miss that you moved. His perception technically saw you move, but I propagate perception results to "investigation pos" manually & it doesn't happen during that action. But I like it! It's like he can't see what he's doing when he's doing that attack 😃

sinbad, to gamedev
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Just messing with some poor skelly

I added some better investigation behaviour on top of his combat behaviour (which is also snappier now thanks to fixing some problems with my custom EQS bits). All implemented with Utility AI via SUSS
https://youtu.be/9Nr6s760E7Q

sinbad, to unrealengine
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I'm investigating the best way to analyse a (Win64, C++, ) minidump these days. Rider doesn't do it (barring .Net), which is a shame. WinDbg is super unfriendly and I hate it. VS works quite well, but I'd rather not rely on it - I only really use the compilers as a back-end these days so don't pay for it.

I feel like a new debug tool was discussed around here recently but I can't remember it for the life of me what it was called or whether it was suited to minidump analysis. Any tips?

sinbad,
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Apparently UE used to come with a symbol debugging tool of its own back in the day, but this seems to have long since been removed from the engine

sinbad,
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@julienbarnoin yeah that’s what I’ve tried and it works fine, I’d just prefer not to rely on it given MS can be fickle

sinbad,
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@bbbscarter aha yes RemedyBG was what I was trying to remember, thanks

sinbad,
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@gdcorner I was thinking of RemedyBG but this looks interesting too

sinbad,
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RemedyBG (https://remedybg.itch.io/remedybg) was the one I was trying to remember. It's cool, but it doesn't currently support minidumps unfortunately (I've bought it to try anyway because it's very clever)

psychicparrot42, to random
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Yelp! My kids are both getting into Warhammer 40,000 and there’s no way in hell any of us can afford those prices!! 🙄

sinbad,
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@psychicparrot42 3D printing to the rescue?

ben, to random
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Citations Needed really is the single best podcast I would recommend to people to understand the news and current events.
https://pca.st/episode/db4d1d39-f313-4724-b010-923360146d4d

sinbad,
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@ben For a UK & tech news/politics slant I'd recommend Trash Future https://www.trashfuture.co.uk/

sinbad, to Unreal
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I've found myself making custom EQS code for SUSS because I found limitations with core . E.g. the "Trace" test is for line of sight, but if you use anything other than a line, you can get false positives because the tests always start exactly on the end points. Although you can ignore the actors there, if there are other things very close to them, but technically on the other side, they can clip & fail the test when LOS is fine. Here's an example with a sphere LOS test, core vs custom

My custom EQS test, which lets you offset the test along the trace line to fix this problem

sinbad, to random
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Major change to the inertia scoring system in SUSS; previously it just added inertia bonus to a decided action for future evaluations (reducing over time), which was fine so long as in future updates that action scored averagely well if it took some time. I found that in boundary cases where an action wanted to change state such that future evaluations scored badly or not at all, the action was susceptible to getting interrupted regardless of inertia. You could bodge it by making sure 1/n

sinbad,
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...state wasn't changed until late in the action's execution, but this was fragile & hacky. So instead I've made it so that once you've made a decision, that entire score (including inertia) becomes a minimum score for that action (in that context), which reduces as a whole over time. If subsequent evals score it more highly, that 'tops it up' (but no inertia, that only gets added on new decisions). It makes for a much more intuitive way to avoid 'flip/flopping' under fluctuating state 2/2

sinbad,
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The idea of Utility AI is quite simple, but there's a lot of devil in the details of exactly what you do with the scoring system, what levers and tweaks you can apply to it, how contexts are generated via queries, what should be a context/scoring system and what should be in the action implementation. I've learned a lot over the last couple of months implementing and using it

sinbad,
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How all the bits interact is fascinating as well. You can short-circuit this inertia system by priority groups for example, meaning you can implement "once you've decided to do something, resist changing your mind for a while, UNLESS it's one of these things in which case totally change your mind RIGHT NOW"

sinbad, (edited ) to random
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I’d heard a couple of people say that Xbox was basically not worth aiming for anymore as an indie, unless they offer you a chunky Game Pass deal - which they probably won’t, unless you’re a known quantity by reputation or sales on other platform. This article backs that up; good to know if like me you’re an outsider to console dev and would be going in blind https://www.patreon.com/posts/do-game-still-to-104149801?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

sinbad,
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@psychicparrot42 I guess it depends on the game? I don’t think they give away dev kits anymore though

sinbad,
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@psychicparrot42 @gilesgoat ahh maybe that’s the difference, perhaps the impression from other indies was of the SeriesX / PS5 targets. Do you know what console your players bought it on?

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