@teamonkey@mastodon.social
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teamonkey

@teamonkey@mastodon.social

Game designer. Inept astrophotographer. Boring in ways you couldn’t possibly imagine.

@teamonkey.bsky.social

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garius, to random
@garius@mastodon.me.uk avatar

And she's done.

teamonkey,
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@garius I can’t tell if that’s copper panelling or faux-wood but either way I’m for it

teamonkey, to random
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

Trying to work out what this symbol means

Craigp, to random
@Craigp@mastodon.social avatar

I haven't seen the Fallout show and don't care to, but it does raise an interesting point.

So much of the Fallout tone is the straight-faced nonsense. The PLAYER knows the world is a joke, but everyone in the world takes it seriously. Even when they joke, they joke while taking the world seriously.

I'm not sure how I'd translate that to a show. I think it'd get real grating.

Of course, each game took itself more seriously, so maybe we just forget the setting is a farce.

teamonkey,
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp I think they absolutely nailed the tone, to be honest.

teamonkey, to random
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp I don’t suppose you ever worked out how to sample the Unreal wave height on the GPU? The niagara function to do so requires you to pass in a water body actor, which only works on the CPU. Blows my mind that there’s no function to do that on the GPU.

teamonkey,
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp Ugggh it sucks so hard

Craigp, to random
@Craigp@mastodon.social avatar

Ugh, I know it's trivial and stupid, but I just really love how visual coding looks. It's just... really beautiful.

teamonkey,
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp Highly underrated

teamonkey,
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@Smingleigh @Craigp If you get BP Assist it will arrange your nodes for you and every time it does it’s pure AntonioBanderas.gif

geekmomprojects, to random
@geekmomprojects@mastodon.social avatar

Making some cheap and (relatively) easy LED matrix pendants using Lolin C3 mini boards flashed with WLED and soldered to (Lolin's) 8x8 RGB shield. I 3D printed cases with translucent lids and holes for the power wires to form the necklace "chain" that connects to a behind-the-neck battery holder.

teamonkey,
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@geekmomprojects That’s a nice result. Did you use resin or FDM for the translucent lid?

llamasoft_ox, to random
@llamasoft_ox@toot.wales avatar

I saw someone mentioning Bruce Lee just now and that reminded me of the old Bruce Lee game that everyone had back in the 8-bit days.

A good game, and me being me one of my favourite parts of it wasn't even an interactive part of the game, it was a big fat ox thing that sat atop decorative pillars in a few of the game levels.

teamonkey,
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@llamasoft_ox This ox is the only one that’s mooing

Craigp, to random
@Craigp@mastodon.social avatar

As much time as I spent getting the Unreal water plugin working, I probably need to upgrade.

A huge part of the game is that the depth of the water is divided into four clear categories, and those need to determine both the material color and the wave pattern.

I can change the material color based on depth, but not the waves. All waves apply to the entire water body at 100%, it seems.

I COULD replace the waves as you drive into a new depth, but then players would have different waves.

teamonkey,
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp Had the same problem and I haven’t found one that has true localised wave regions. Also one that syncs those waves in multiplayer.

Craigp, to random
@Craigp@mastodon.social avatar

Well damn, I was hoping the weird buoyancy grid the Unreal water plugin used was just some raycasts, but it's clearly not, and I can't get wave height that way.

I think it's probably accessing a heightmap somewhere, but I have just no fucking clue where.

teamonkey,
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp IIRC it can but only on the GPU. Because the water plug-in uses a landscape renderer and deforms it into waves only on the GPU. If you try and do any measurements or calculations of the water system on the CPU it thinks the water is a flat plane.

So you can use vertex offsets to make objects appear to sit on the surface of the water. You can also sample that info off the GPU and send it back to the CPU but it’s asynchronous and slow.

teamonkey,
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp I can’t quite remember. I think you have to pass a water body entity in to niagara as a parameter and you have to do that on beginplay.

Craigp, to random
@Craigp@mastodon.social avatar

Trying to sort out how to make boat movement mechanics in Unreal.

The problem is that all the canned pawn movement systems assume you're either flying or on the ground. The flying ones don't even offer gravity and the walking ones sure as hell don't offer "bobbing around half-into a surface".

Trying to decide whether I should make a custom "gravity"/collision monitoring system or if I should have the boat hull wobble around a collider that's "walking" on the surface of the water.

teamonkey,
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp There are buoyancy systems, but Unreal’s water system is… unpleasant. There are much better plugins on the marketplace but they cost money so not ideal for prototyping.

teamonkey,
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp Oceanography is probably the best, but also quite expensive. Most of the plugins are there to make art demos rather than gameplay.

teamonkey,
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp But Unreal’s water body system is the worst Unreal feature I’ve tried to date. Obtuse, limited and undocumented.

Craigp, to Unreal
@Craigp@mastodon.social avatar

OK, question. I have a Character.

I would like some information linked to that character to be stored entirely on the server and never sent to the client. Similarly, I'd like some event functions to be called only on the server, such as Begin/EndOverlap with certain object classes.

I am using strictly blueprinting.

How do I do this as cleanly as possible? Just... uh, create two entirely separate actors that are tethered together?

teamonkey,
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp GameMode only exists on the server, so you should put stuff only the server knows in there.

For overlaps, a HasAuthority check will do the job, so long as you have a normal dedicated, authoritative server.

teamonkey, (edited )
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp As a map or array, yeah.

AFAIK there is no default structure that is per-player and that only exists on the server. Most (all?) of the Player* instances do some kind of automatic communication with the client, or get overwritten in circumstances that don’t happen in a SP game.

Craigp, to random
@Craigp@mastodon.social avatar

I was thinking about space ship "sports" players might like to play, to at least partially substitute for WW1 dogfighting.

What about surfing?

What if there's some ground-effect-like "gravity flow" that allows ships to cruise at low altitudes even on airless planets, and it has flows and stuff?

So players can play around getting as deep (close to the ground) as possible for max speeds...

teamonkey,
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp My view is that things aren’t fun unless you’re touching the controls. That’s the problem with wide open expanses, you don’t need to correct the steering ever, you just point and go. You might as well be on autopilot.

teamonkey,
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp Yeah, currents, waves & turbulence are good. Slight effects that make you want to change your course or maybe take a risk to follow a faster route.

teamonkey,
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp Gravity is another thing. Especially is it’s interplanetary space, the path your ship takes near to a gravity well is complex and unintuitive and therefore interesting and challenging.

Craigp, to Unreal
@Craigp@mastodon.social avatar

OK, question.

I'm familiar with the open world setup Unreal uses, but what I want is an endless strip of land to use for high-speed cinematic flythroughs.

Is there some easy way to set that up?

teamonkey,
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp The landscape is just a height map renderer with tesselation. In UE5 landscapes can be extremely large, but not endless. However if you don’t need the close-up detail and really do want an infinite landscape I’d just whizz some static meshes past the camera.

Craigp, to random
@Craigp@mastodon.social avatar

Wandered into a video about why modders are struggling with Starfield, and this guy seems to think the problem is float3 positions.

Which is definitely a common problem with space games, but I dunno if I'd say that makes it unmoddable. Kerbal has float3 positions too.

And the kraken is an ongoing joke, yes, but there's 98 billion mods and it's fun.

teamonkey,
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp I think normally the modding community has some clear targets about what to improve, the game would be much better if only...

For most games I can think of an answer to “what is one thing you could do to improve this game” but with Starfield I am totally stumped. Improving one thing just seems futile, like spitting into the ocean.

teamonkey,
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp I don’t think the engine’s the real problem. It’s old and tired, sure, and probably restricts the vision somewhat, but even so there were some truly incomprehensible choices made.

Craigp, to random
@Craigp@mastodon.social avatar

Anyway, I goofed around with some camera effects. It's pretty straightforward to create them, but alas, I suck at actually knowing what to create.

teamonkey,
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp If you haven’t already tried it, FoV is vital for conveying acceleration and deceleration

davidallengreen, to random
@davidallengreen@mastodon.green avatar

Tamworth.

Where even the most terrifyingly illiberal views are middle-of-the-road.

Tamworth has fallen.

If you know the western midlands, you will know the significance of this.

teamonkey,
@teamonkey@mastodon.social avatar

@davidallengreen Labour up 20 points but turnout down 30 points. I can’t see the raw stats on any of the major news sites, but I’m pretty sure that means that fewer people voted for Labour than in 2019. Labour won because their voters were slightly less apathetic than the Tories.

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