New lobber enemy (I affectionately refer to them as my lobby boys) making poison clouds and hiding behind things, annoyingly

Explosions can now destroy diggable areas. Now we're mining!💥⛏️

Minermancers spell work this week: physics objects and AOEs! Here’s a bouncing explosive barrel spell that’s fun to play with Getting client prediction and smooth replication working on physics objects was fiddly but it works now.

Minermancers progress this week: spray-style spells. Multiplayer predicted, and the underlying damage shapes are properly simulated to match the particle effects

SUDS Pro is on sale! It's my #unrealengine dialogue plugin that lets you use text files to write dialogue, direct camera cuts, character animation and more. If you prefer writing dialogue like a script, I think this is a nice way to do it. Reposts appreciated! www.fab.com/listings/3e3...

This GUID fixer for UE saved me today. I suddenly started getting startup crashes in Game/Packaged builds in the texture streaming system, turns out that a couple of textures had ended up with the same GUID somehow. https://github.com/Nehipasta/UnrealGuidFixer

Another indie game that I’ve been really enjoying this weekend: Minishoot Adventures. Basically “what if 2D Zelda was a twin-stick shmup”. Lovely clean art, charming, rewards looking for secrets, top notch https://store.steampowered.com/app/1634860/Minishoot_Adventures/

Enjoyed playing through Thank Goodness You’re Here last night. Bonkers and slightly surreal with enough “thee’s” and “thou’s” to remind me of my late grandfather. Gotta wonder how well it translates though 😂 https://store.steampowered.com/app/2366980/Thank_Goodness_Youre_Here/

Switched our lobby level back to static lighting today. Old skool tweaking lightmap resolutions. I regret nothing, it's all we need and it runs like butter

Quietly allowing people to assume you use LLM chatbots as well so they stop fecking talking at you about it

I'm not planning to have damage numbers popping out of enemies, but it's very useful to be able to see damage values in testing. I had too much fun making these. Maybe I might use it in a practice range area in the real game at least Video: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@sinbad/115293654944221548

Spending all day in this view making very careful changes so I don't break any of the multiplayer replication & prediction systems, as I chop up the spell system and re-assemble it. All appears to be working again now but 😖I hate multiplayer code

You thought bureaucracy was bad? Enter "vibe working" in Office 365! Try getting any sense at all out of the corporate world now everyone's had their brains cooked by delegating 90% of cognitive functions to a statistically biased bingo machine

What my chair actually looks like vs what my cats think it is This afternoon Merry was defeated in single combat by my chair while I was trying to do the hoovering

I use honey instead of sugar in my bread these days, and having to rescue the last remnants of solidifying honey from the bottom of the bottle with heat and water has made my routinely eyeballed measurements even vaguer than usual.

How very dare games I want to play come out of early access and remove my excuse for why they're not technically adding to my backlog 😭

Got my electric cargo bike properly serviced today. I guess I should probably learn how to do what they did myself - I can do simple things but it's more complex than my old push bike used to be (e.g. actual brake fluid!) and I haven't really found the time

The beta of GOLD TEETH has a great hook #ttrpg

This PR spam seems too dumb even for AI - it just changes my name to theirs and adds some whitespace. Suspect just a kid trying to get a PR approved for a school assignment or something. Blocked anyway, they have to learn https://github.com/sinbad/GitScripts/pull/3

Uuum, sure but that's not really my fault, is it? This is your default install location, maybe you should shorten *your* paths 🙄🤣 #unrealengine

I always knew gamers who cry “just add multiplayer, it should only take a couple of months” were idiots but JFC, the experience of making a game where multiplayer was in scope from the start really underlines what absolute bellendery that is

I baked my first apple pie of the year since our tree is ready. Left it to cool on the unit while we ate dinner, with a net cover over it.

I wasn’t expecting much from Skate but I thought I’d at least try it. It spent ages to start up (anti cheat), then completely locked up my PC (likely also anti-cheat since regular software can’t do that and my drivers have been stable for months). Absolutely feck that nonsense. In the bin you go

CW: Foundation S3 minor spoilers Really enjoying Lee Pace once again in Foundation S3, managing to bring yet another version of the character to the table. Instead of Dawn, Day and Dusk this time they have Dawn, Dude and Dusk 😄

Some days you get to work on cool looking stuff. Other days you’re just debugging ownership chains looking for the broken link that’s causing an actor to not get unloaded at the right time 😑

Mini UE tip: need an aiming direction in a 3rd-person game? Simple, right? No. There are 3 to choose from: 1. Actor direction (where the character is facing) 2. Camera direction (where the camera is facing) 3. Controller direction (where the player WANTS to face)

Literally every time I flip a couple of switches in succession in our slightly echoey kitchen, my brain assumes it’s the intro to Fools Gold by the Stone Roses and starts playing the rest https://youtu.be/NSD11dnphg0?si=c4rKeYBZ8pLjSls4

Me: puts books sideways and on top of a bookshelf because of lack of space Also me: still has stuff like this on another shelf for some reason. I don’t even use a Mac anymore

Finally got around to clearing my last blocker for updating to UE 5.6 - my Runtime Virtual Texture based map system stopped working entirely. Turns out they added a new member to FPrimitiveSceneProxy that I only found by diffing the source 🙄

I find it hilarious that Apple thinks I want a phone with maximum surface area and minimum thickness. The thing that goes in my pocket. In case it’s not obvious my pocket has finite WxH, and has a tendency to apply bend force. How is this fit for purpose

My headstone will read "I bet this behaves differently in multiplayer"

Ahhhh I just figured out how to get a more traditional timeline sequence view of frame timings in Superluminal: you just re-sort the instance table on the left, which defaults to Duration descending, which is why the worst offenders are at the top.

I was just sharing my newfound love of Superluminal with someone and I noticed the tagline "From installation to first fix in less than 10 minutes." on the website. It was 100% true in my case! Marketing copy that's actually true? Unheard of 😜

I was having real problems tracking down a periodic drop in performance using Unreal Insights, I was missing a STAT declaration where it was happening and it was just being subsumed into "FTimerManager::Tick". Figured it was a good time to try Superluminal.

I can totally see why middle managers think LLMs improve productivity, they also hover around more productive people spouting vaguely plausible nonsense and think they’re adding value

Without wanting to jinx it, it’s been 2 weeks since I swapped the PSU on my wife’s work PC and it seems to have gotten a lot more stable since. Perhaps my hunch* was correct *after ruling out a ton of other things like memory timing, bad drivers, overheating etc

I wrote up how I implemented navmesh generation through solid but destructible geometry in our game, something I could find very little written about (that didn't suggest a worse solution). #unrealengine #gamedev

There's been a lot of negative talk lately about "the UE look", which I don't really agree with, but I can see some aspects of. But at least I can say with some confidence that we don't really have that look. Probably because we've turned off so much we're basically using UE4 with better tooling

My next job is to try to get NPCs to path find through diggable geometry as a last resort. This is trickier than I thought, navmesh modifiers can only really make *open* areas more costly, not make areas blocked with colliders navigable at high cost 🤔

Amazing what a little roughness map tweaking can do for the punchiness of surfaces (Marie did the actual work, not me) [Our hero materials use a packed AORMH map where R=AO, G=Roughness, B=Metallic, A=Height, authored in Substance]

Ugh fiiiine. Just spent a bunch of time changing raw pointers to TObjectPtr for a few of my plugins because some people like to enforce it. Because it's great to have to do things like MutableView() and ObjectPtrDecay() all over the place 😩

Me, playing Elden Ring: this is possibly the best game ever made Also me, playing Elden Ring: what is this absolute horseshit

My top 3 games by play time on Steam: Deep Rock Galactic: 380 hours Elden Ring: 260 hours 7 Days To Die: 240 hours 2 out of 3 I play co-op with my wife. Even Elden Ring has co-op (if fleeting - but I play solo). But fair to say I like co-op games

I usually don’t do anything particularly complex in DaVinci Resolve so cutting together this several minute VO montage from tens of source videos is stretching my capabilities

Moving around the house at near to cat feeding time is like being the centre of a Presidential motorcade, except the outriders are constantly tripping you up

I SAID, YOUNG MAN

Look, you don’t have to move fast AND break things. If you’d just put a few more points in to Dex, you could move fast *without* blundering into everything.

Screenshots of the new ground variation system. Both the materials and rock scatters can vary based on ground type. I implemented this by re-using the systems that make ground reflect the mineables that *used* to be there when they're mined away

Adding a new feature has involved deleting more code than I added Video: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@sinbad/115072007126863694

We’ve bought the cats more new toys to try to keep them entertained but the ones they like best by a country mile are random feathers we’ve just picked up off the ground outside