sinbad

sinbad, 1 year ago to random

Merry and Pippin have entered the building, raise alert level to amber 😻😻

sinbad, 9 months ago to random

Seriously Microsoft, f**k off with these semi-daily "have you considered playing Minecraft?" desktop notifications.

Instead, maybe push desktop notifications daily to your product managers that say "have you considered not being a total arse to your paying customers today?"

sinbad, 15 days ago to random

Hearing that Recall is exclusive to Copilot+ machines with NPUs is a an extremely good reason to never buy a Copilot+ machine with NPU

sinbad, 1 month ago to random

F**ks sake they changed something pretty fundamental between UE 5.4 Preview and UE 5.4 Final - the ability to have multiple objects in an asset file, which SUDS relies on - the dialogue and string table are in the same asset; now the string table is gone.

I was worried they might do this because they started hiding them in 5.3 (not a problem) so I tested 5.4 Preview but everything was fine. Now it's completely broken in 5.4 Final, every single dialogue line is <MISSING STRING TABLE ENTRY> 😠

sinbad, 8 months ago to random

Re the last boost, I wonder how much the fact that Unity did loads of proprietary work to make C# fast enough to use in quite complicated, lower level game code has given a false impression that C# is a good fit for that sort of job. Vs more traditional approaches like C# being your high level scripting, with something more (memory) efficient under the hood and in the hot paths.

sinbad, 11 months ago to random

Hrm, not sure I’m going to be able to put SUDS Pro on the Unreal Marketplace. You're not allowed to link to any external libs, so I’m re-bundling my SUDS modules inside it so it’s self-contained, but Epic don’t seem to like the MIT license headers in there. MIT is very permissive but seems you have to use their license alone; which is problematic. While it’s 99.9% my code, to re-license it I'd have to get copyright assignments from any PRs and that’s a ballache (done it before) 🙄

sinbad, 8 months ago to Unreal

Does #unreal really have no support at all for shader array parameters? It's pretty annoying if so, this is really dumb when I could just do ColourParamArray[StencilValue-200]

sinbad, 1 month ago to random

I was motivated to give Fallout 76 a chance after the TV series but after a couple of evenings I think I’m done. It feels like Disney made a Fallout theme park where people are weirdly nice (scavengers just giving you stimpacks?) and everything has already been done before but the actors are trying to make you feel like you’re the protagonist, it’s just weird. And also incredibly bland for the usual MMO reasons

sinbad, 1 year ago to random

Please stop trying to make computers smarter. All it does is make them do the wrong thing in even more obtuse ways

sinbad, 4 days ago to unrealengine

Well, thank f**k for that. UE 5.4.2 finally fixes String Table support which has been completely broken (pre-localisation builds) since 5.4.0. SUDS works again!

Please Epic, never do this to me again. I'm of an age that my heart attack risk is only increasing, so I'd appreciate not having the extra shove 😬 #unrealengine

sinbad, 8 days ago to random

I thought I was being really smart by using sockets on weapons to position melee attacks so that you can just trigger overlaps via anim notifies a little before potential impact, and if you make the overlap boxes big enough you get a nice directional element to attacks for cheap (good for making particles fly and directional knockback)

Reader, this does not work well under varying frame rate conditions. After this I'm definitely going to test the game with t.MaxFPS=20 more often 🤦‍♂️

sinbad, 14 days ago to random

Bleh, Git 2.45 broke fresh clones of repos using git-lfs because they disallow post-checkout hooks by default, this broke my overnight game builds. https://github.com/git-lfs/git-lfs/issues/5749

Should be fixed in Git 2.45.2 apparently, but the temporary workaround is to define the env var GIT_CLONE_PROTECTION_ACTIVE=false during clone

sinbad, 11 months ago to random

As a committed single-monitor dude (multi-monitor is terrible for your neck/back) using a dedicated monitor just for work not gaming, the LG DualUp really calls to me. 16:9 sucks as an orientation for coding, & rotated portrait? Ridiculous. But 16:18? 👌 One big area for coding, or for UE / video editing put a 16:9 viewport at the top and all your controls below: great!

Bit expensive though 😬 That's going on my wishlist for when I can justify it. Thanks @djlink
https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-28mq780-b-dualup-monitor

sinbad, 18 days ago to random

I'm not a fan of using video for everything, but even when I do watch YouTube tutorials, what is it with these people that just basically talk over doing the thing, without ever explaining WHY they're doing the thing? They never seem to cover the conceptual framework for why you'd choose to do it that way, or how any of the pieces fit together. It's like they're trying to teach you a magic ritual that you should just regurgitate, rather than teaching you the meaning behind it

sinbad, 5 months ago to random

I built my first PC in 1991 and besides a few years as a Mac guy I’ve always done so, but I’ve never been the water cooling type. But a combination of it being much easier now (AIOs) and wanting to build a SFF gaming machine meant I gave it a go.

A couple of years later, and I still prefer air cooling. Less to go wrong, and not really any noisier if you get good quiet fans. More space efficient though, and better for looks (I don’t care about RGB & glass panels though)

sinbad, 8 months ago to random

I actually didn’t know how deliberately unprofitable Unity was, I assumed they had modest profits before the VC nonsense, but apparently not. Billions of debt. They did the thing of burning through money to wipe everyone else out and get into a position of dominance, before hitting the screw-tightening button on their captive customer base. You know, the standard late capitalism shitty monopolist manoeuvre. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unitys-self-combustion-engine-this-week-in-business

People trying to make profitable engines never stood a chance

sinbad, 10 months ago to random

Went to clip a website into OneNote today, something I do regularly to preserve a local copy of handy blog posts in case they suffer link rot, but got this.

Well screw you too, Microsoft. I still use OneNote because I have Office/OneDrive anyway but I wouldn't say it's "good", just that it does the job and doesn't cost me anything extra. Anyone know any good open alternatives? I need to be able to sync between multiple users and to mobile devices.

sinbad, 7 months ago to random

I've been using a landscape for my ground just because it was easy to fill with temp data, and it's already set up for virtual texturing and sampling the ground colour.

Problem is, landscapes are not designed to be edited at runtime. Like, at all. Looks like a huge ballache. Which for a game with procedural levels is not ideal. So, that's out then, building my own ground patches it is https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/runtime-landscape-editing/631305

sinbad, 7 months ago to random

VR tech is definitely improving, I managed to use a friend’s Quest 3 for a whole 3 or 4 minutes before the leading edge of the impending migraine started to arrive, that’s a record for me

sinbad, 5 months ago to random

You probably all already know this, but since I only got around to installing it relatively recently - I’m slow to take on new sw, maybe you too - PowerToys is fantastic & everyone on Win should use it. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/#current-powertoy-utilities

All those QoL things you wish Windows had are here; window layouting, easy access to accented characters like macOS, file quick look like macOS, Alt+Space quick launch like ma…

Look it takes a lot of stuff from macOS before Apple became like they are now. This is good

sinbad, 11 months ago to random

So this is a thing now (sigh)

He’s getting up there using the cooker hood, the scamp. Determined to get to places other cats haven’t before, is Merry

Merry the black and white kitten on top of very high kitchen cabinets
Merry the black and white kitten on top of very high kitchen cabinets

sinbad, 7 months ago to random

Loads of people pile on Git-LFS but at a time when people were ignoring anything that wasn’t Git (even Hg, which was great) and with no way to change certain things about Git, it was a miracle to make something that works as well as it does.

We still use it with UE, with locking, it works for us. Some edge cases but rare once you set it up right. Tooling in eg Fork is good.

I don’t like Perforce and SVN is clunky & slow so it’s better for us than those

sinbad, 8 months ago to random

To everyone who has started up their blogs again lately: I see you, and you’re awesome. I’m listening, my RSS reader is ready

sinbad, 11 months ago to random

The UE cross-compilation Windows->Linux pipeline seems weird/broken for BuildPlugin cases, it does in fact build everything (proven by deliberately re-introducing a Clang-only error) but it only generates Intermediate files, no binaries. I was digging around for ages trying to find libSudsPro et al but they’re just not there, only the .o’s.

I guess I can at least prove there’s no compile errors, but unless UE on Linux skips libs and links .o files direct from plugins this seems broken

sinbad, 1 month ago to random

Looking up guides on Elite Dangerous and constantly getting advice that says “the minimum you need to be effective is insert equipment with a price tag of 10 million credits” which is not that useful 🙄

Reminds me of the “you could buy a house if you stopped eating avocado toast” line of financial advice