@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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jonikorpi, to random
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Sooo how do we protect the web from AI-enshittification? A new search engine? Perhaps powered by human curation? Easier self-publishing via better social media? Something else?

sinbad,
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@jonikorpi I think the people that understand what’s going on and don’t like it will build human-scale peer-to-peer enclaves like this one and largely disappear from the “mainstream Internet” which will be mostly comprised of bots and ads. Maybe we’ll occasionally fire a probe into that horrid place for commercial reasons but it won’t be where we’ll live

sinbad,
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@jonikorpi I think the idea that you can slap everyone together in one big online social system and expect that to work is unrealistic. It’s not how real world social interactions work either, and that’s the limiter, not the tech. It’s not about nerd elitism or anything, I don’t want that either, but people naturally form self-organising groups for various reasons; they overlap and people join many, but each have their own mutually agreed conventions & rules. It’s messy but then so are people.

sinbad,
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@jonikorpi it’s also that you can’t run a big singular system without it becoming enshittified by the money folks, because it costs too much to run without it. We need it to be cheap & easy for people to self host anything so that we don’t need that. Let anyone be a node that is part of as many systems as they want to join in various dimensions: interests, work roles, social connections etc.

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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@glassbottommeg I’m sort of glad TBH, not having to think about Xbox & PS and just concentrate on Steam and maybe consider Switch 2 at some point is a lot more manageable

psychicparrot42, to random
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I’m a middle aged English bloke, a visitor from the past, so I find high fives awkward. I’ll go along with your high five - I won’t leave ya hangin’ no way that’d be rude - but inside I’ll be thinking the whole experience was a bit odd and I’ll be wondering how forced and awkward it might have looked on the outside.

sinbad,
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@psychicparrot42 I don't think I've ever literally high-fived anyone. I would definitely screw it up

sinbad,
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@dev_ric @psychicparrot42 More likely just miss, or glance off in a super uncool way

psychicparrot42, to random
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I dunno if it’s the time of year or what, but I really feel like I’ve got no game making vibes recently.. not feelin’ it and I’m just having to power through, working on a purely functional level. Operating system only, like. I just hope I can find my groove again soon!

sinbad,
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@psychicparrot42 I used to tell my mentees that this was fine & natural for most people; you naturally ebb and flow on everything, even the things you love. No-one can be full bore all the time, at least not without a major crash / burnout at the end. It’ll be back in its own time

sinbad, to random
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We’ve suspected for a while that our heating system is way over spec since we added loads of insulation to the house, and now the system needs replacing we’ve had it recalculated. And sure enough the numbers say our heat loss on a cold day (rare here) is about half what the current system can put out, so the replacement can be smaller. Definitely don’t regret maxing out the external wall insulation almost a decade ago, it massively changed how warm our 1930s single block house stays

GeekAndDad, to random
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Uhg…. Not interested in made up answers. Why are they doing this? https://mastodon.social/@macrumors/112433267752186185

sinbad,
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@GeekAndDad the best I’ve got is “because everyone else is”

Think…Same

mvu, to random
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Threw out my back last night and this morning has been an absolute adventure of pain.

Get out of bed? Not so fast!

Go down the stairs? Not a chance!

Need to pee? 30 minute sweaty odyssey clinging to walls and chairs.

Wild times

sinbad,
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@mvu oof, I know what this is like, I recommend ibuprofen and rest for a day or two followed by gentle exercise (e.g. careful walking) and stretching as soon as you can manage it

sinbad, to random
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Think I’m going to be basically done with my first full pass of the game AI next week. That means my final task should probably be to write some proper documentation for SUSS before moving on, to head off the inevitable “Gandalf in Moria” moment when I come back to it in 6 months 😄

sinbad, to random
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Random memory today. At 11 years old I was on holiday visiting family in Cornwall, and my cousins gave me Jet Set Willy as a gift. I had no idea what it was about, this was before I started getting Crash magazine. My cousins had a Vic20 so we couldn’t play it, I had to wait until we went home. I spent the next 2 weeks trying to imagine what this game was, based solely on a cassette inlay with no info, just loading instructions and a picture of a man with his head in the toilet. Different times 😂

eniko, to random
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For my birthday, I'd really like it if my beloved fedi could spread word far and wide of Kitsune Tails. It's a platformer with a heartwarming story featuring queer main characters and personal discoveries in classic SMB3 style. You can find trailer, screenshots, and wishlist links here: https://kitsunegames.com/kitsunetails

It's coming out this year and the team and I have been working hard on it for several years now. Most of the team is queer in some form so by boosting you'd not only be making me happy on my birthday, but supporting a bunch of queer creators making queer art as well

yuzu kitsune tails, a purple haired fox girl, picks up samurai armor in a tower that's rapidly filling with lava. she jumps away from the rising lava and sticks her spear in the wall, doing a dashing twirl to get on top of it. she walks off the spear and into a new scene, fighting a ghost fox with armor and spear. it stabs and she jumps over, but is caught by a follow up stab. the ghost fox over extends and its ghostly powers wane, giving yuzu a chance to bop on its head

sinbad,
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@eniko I thought you were supposed to have the day off…

Happy birthday!

sinbad, to random
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I finally got my mining setup to work in Elite Dangerous (by buying a better refinery with more bins, and learning not to direct collector drones but just let them get on with it) and immediately made about 1.6 million credits in 2 runs, which compared to the 30k or so I was making at a time before via trading was very exciting.

sinbad,
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To celebrate, I bought a fat new ship shaped like a brick that has no space for guns after mining tools are attached, but it’s got a ton of cargo space and room for an even better refinery. I’ll probably get immediately killed by the first pirate that glances my way but whatever, I’m all in on the fat defenceless space truck build

sinbad,
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@kojack good to know, I always log out when docked, I thought maybe that was a requirement (but never tested it)

sinbad, (edited ) to random
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Pippin loves using his brother’s, ahem, “generous girth” as a pillow, and Merry seems fine with it #caturday

sinbad, to random
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The fact that Apple is considering just shoving ChatGPT into iOS to stay relevant suggests to me they’ve fully lost the plot

sinbad,
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@jkaniarz I only use Siri for timers and reminders and it does those fine, I really don’t want to chat with my phone TBH. I have the constant listening mode turned off and they better not force that back on

kojack, to random
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Going through some of my old project screenshots...

Someone on the Ogre3D forum asked how to render a large city map with lots of street lights.
I made a shader that could do a huge number of lights for the cost of 9 lights, under certain constraints. Street lights tend to be spread apart, not a lot of overlap.

Pic1: test mesh with 64 random lights
Pic2: 4096 dynamic lights at 918fps
Pic3: car with headlights (a moving street light) driving on the map

image/jpeg
image/jpeg

sinbad,
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@kojack I remember this one, was very impressive at the time!

sinbad, to random
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I held off updating Rider to 2024 because I hate it when my productivity is thrown off by problems with early major versions of things, but it’s had 2 updates now so I rolled the dice.

Seems good. The “show Blueprints in the call stack” thing is very nice, but not 100% reliable. It actually lied to me about where a call was coming from (it was impossible; when I debugged in UE I saw where it was actually coming from) so that needs a bit more work. But they’ve fixed some general niggles

sinbad, to random
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Mood

sinbad,
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@kimau that’s kinda my passive mood, they’re often just wandering about randomly in that mood. It’s a mood data point rather than a full state, there are several things they can actually do when in that mood

sinbad,
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I’ve definitely seen the benefit of using “weighted random top N” utility action choice, it adds some nice variation. I started off using best choice and you still need it for some cases but I’ve tried to make most of my action choices have some level of randomness within groups

sinbad,
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BTW this might look like a FSM but it’s mostly not, it’s just one data point: how aggravated the enemy is. It doesn’t directly drive AI actions, it’s just one piece of data I can use in the utility calculations to choose what to do, and to modify actions. Eg if they’re investigating a sound, if they’re annoyed they’ll run to that location rather than walk. It sort of behaves like a one-item FSM in how it changes, but the link to actions is much looser meaning it’s a lot more flexible

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