@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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The background lore of our game revolves around the idea that magic is great, exciting and holds so much potential for the world but it’s been hoarded and land grabbed by a tiny subset of society (in our case one big corporation which everything is a subsidiary of, just for ease of narrative, like an Evil Corp) who use it for things no-one wants but it still somehow makes them richer.

Write what you know they say 😛

SonnyBonds, to random
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@sinbad Hey, sorry if I'm asking something I could figure out on my own, but is there somewhere I could read about your agent AI/behavior stuff?

sinbad,
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@SonnyBonds https://github.com/sinbad/SUSS Docs are a little thin still but that's the whole code

sinbad, to random
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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,
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The problem is that anim notifies don't always line up precisely with what the skeleton is doing, even if you use "Branching Point" notifies (rather than "Queued"). The timing is better with Branching Point, but under varying FPS conditions that weapon may be in a vastly different position at 20fps vs 60fps. It means a frame rate hitch can whiff an attack.

I'm going to fall back to pre-defined object space positions, and have the option to do sweep test from there & ignore the animation state

sinbad,
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Yay, my melee attacks are now happy even at low frame rates, and they look better generally using this dumber approach, similar to what @glassbottommeg blogged about recently. I did need to create an extra anim notify class to make it easy to specify which origin to use because I have some combo animations, this is mainly to identify forehand, backhand and overheads & do impacts & knockback that look right directionally

sinbad,
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Getting a shield bash to the face looks good (cloth sim shows he's been punted backwards) but looks like I'm getting hit twice, hmm

sinbad,
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Ah, simple one that - now that our character has multiple skeletal mesh components so you can replace hat, robes, beards etc, I was getting multiple component hit results for one actor (of course). Fixed!

I'm pretty sure those 2 hit results were first his beard, and then his face. Ouch

sinbad,
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Brutal 😬

I may well get rid of the blood / squelchy noises for the final version but I was testing making different creatures have different hit FX (the skeletons have dusty bone puffs, humans have blood right now etc). But there's no reason to get a higher age rating when this isn't a realistic game so I'll probably do something else later, maybe dirt / sparks / cloth bits

A pink wizard gets brutalised by a skeleton

sinbad,
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@glassbottommeg thanks! I’m actually sweeping the box/sphere a short distance to get better coverage and better impact points, it’s slightly better than a plain overlap especially for directionality of a knockback. But I only need 2-3 origin locations/rotations and it’s much simpler

sinbad,
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@JeremiahFieldhaven that’s a good idea, maybe little stars & moons

sinbad,
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@glassbottommeg it’s tracing against the physics asset, that seems to be how all the queries work by default on skinned meshes; I’m not doing hit region specific damage and so far it doesn’t seem too onerous performance wise but I might be being naïve

Craigp, to random
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Decided to install SignalRGB instead of MysticLight this time.

All I want. Is no lights. I don't want the fucking case to glow.

MysticLight had a setting where you could turn off the lights. However, it would then eat more and more and more RAM forever, because ha ha ha

SignalRGB doesn't appear to have a way to just turn off the lights. So I set them to black.

But... it doesn't appear to have any way to say "JUST DO THIS". It keeps fucking resetting to other effects.

sinbad,
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@Craigp I use OpenRGB, it runs at startup to tame my pointless motherboard RGB

sinbad,
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@Craigp you have to save a profile and tell it to use that on startup

sinbad, to random
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I had a very bizarre thing on my machine this morning. I resumed it from hibernate as usual, but my UE builds complained that the UE_5.3\Engine\Source\Editor path was corrupt. I looked, and it was empty 😮 Trying to repair it continuously failed.

Rebooted and it was back, repair completed without doing anything but verifying. It's like something unlinked it from the filesystem temporarily or something. 😕 I did have a virus checker update happen late last night but nothing in logs

sinbad,
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I have 2 other versions of UE installed and neither were affected, just the one I was probably running while the virus checker update happened. I've never seen anything like that before, the files were clearly still there (and I did notice that the overall size of the UE install still looked right), just temporarily inaccessible.

Don't you just love Windows sometimes

sinbad,
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@jonasreich thanks, it makes me feel better that I’m not the only one, but still wtf eh

sinbad, to random
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The outcome of all this LLM deployment is that vendors have to basically admit that it's complete garbage maybe 50% of the time. Imagine selling a product you know will be wrong a bunch of the time. And saying that it's the future. What low standards we have sunk to.

Imagine paying for a product that was crap 50% of the time. Just because the times when it wasn't (or, the times when you couldn't tell) made you go "oooh". It's like being impressed by a magic 8-ball

sinbad,
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I could get all grumpy and say that as an industry we’ve institutionalised half-assing things, and LLMs are just a natural conclusion of that. We’ve too often prioritised velocity and new gimmicks and obfuscation via job-preserving complexity over good product engineering and here we are, finding out

sinbad, to random
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Waking up in the night to find myself completely wedged from both sides by 2 sleeping cats is no good for my back, but I suck it up because they’re too cute to move

Merry in particular loves the crook behind my knees right now. I have about 10 seconds after turning over before a heavy cat flomps against the back of my legs; and if I’m unlucky, starts washing extremely energetically while I try to get back to sleep 🙄 So cute tho

sinbad,
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It's funny how these 2 cats are so friendly, but do not like being picked up, or sitting on your lap; very different to other cats we've had. They'll follow you around, sleep next to you (or sometimes, wedged up against you), generally seek attention quite a lot. I assume it's because they missed the key "human handling" window as kittens, since they were alley cats until 5 months. They're still very happy to be around us, and in fact seek attention more than some, they just have boundaries

sinbad,
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@dougbinks It's been a year for these 2 and they still don't like it, you'll get maybe 10 seconds after picking them up before they're struggling. We keep trying but it might just not be in their nature. They are still young though so maybe that's part of it

nivrig, to random
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Finally caved. New toy day.

sinbad,
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@nivrig congrats, the only brand that makes printers that work

sinbad, to unrealengine
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New blog post: Playing Animation Montages in Multiplayer Games https://www.stevestreeting.com/2024/05/30/playing-animation-montages-in-multiplayer-games/

I'm always grumbling about there only being videos for things in UE when I'd prefer to read a blog post, so here's another from me to go on the "reading" side of the scale.

sinbad,
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The other thing is that I skew towards C++ in my UE posts rather than BPs. I guess video suits BPs better. I write all my core stuff in C++ hence the skew; I do use BPs as well but it's all high-level stuff. I find doing anything non-trivial in BPs quickly becomes basically unmaintainable.

I also think my code snippets are much easier to follow than minutes of watching someone drag noodles around while talking over it. But maybe that's just me, and most people will see C++ and close the tab

sinbad,
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@TomF Maybe? That’s how you tend to explain it to someone so watching it happen as well is probably useful for some people

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