Notices by Jacek Wesołowski (jzillw@mastodon.gamedev.place)

Finally feeling better after a rough few... years, I guess. Almost exactly a decade, in fact. I didn't know I was so tired, until I finally could stop running.

Anyway, starting a new side project. Well, an old one, actually. I'm restarting my dungeon crawler thingie in Unreal, since I don't want to have anything to do with Unity at this point.

Today I bought one of the relatively recent "retro-style" rogue-lite dungeon crawlers, because, you know, research, and it put me off instantly when the exact same looking enemy suddenly turned out to have approximately three times as much HP as it did last time I saw them. Roguelikes rely a lot on randomness and making them "plannable" is one of the more reliable ways to make them feel less unfair.

Trying to revisit games I enjoyed as a kid, I just realized something I liked about "Might & Magic" (the dungeon crawlers, not the turn-based strategies). They had a ton of enemy types in them, and each type had always the same stats. Even though you couldn't see the stats without using a special action, the game allowed planning ahead. The occasional frustrations I remember came from this deal being broken e.g. when a much stronger enemy type was unexpectedly present in a low-level area.

@yora I tend to agree. Sometimes combat is fun, and not just a filler, and then my tolerance is higher. But it's been a long time since I last felt I was playing a game where combat was standing on its own legs.

Playing "Control" and I really wish this game had 80% less combat. Also, adding "posessed people" to my list of things not to do when I get to make a spooky game one day

@yora That's not the same as recent college graduates being unironically called "young adults" by people trying to define target audience for their next media product.

Related hot take: it used to be that you were adolescent (school time), then you were a young adult (has job, hasn't started a family), and then not long after that you would be married and have kids and that's what people called "adulthood". But now the "young adult" part is stretching well into the thirties for most people, so it's becoming a proper life stage of its own.

Incidentally, I'm not married and I don't have kids, so perhaps I'm stuck.

I'll be 44 next month and I'm beginning to realize just how much of contemporary popular culture is aimed at 30-year-olds. Not teens, not adults, but people around 30.

Not that I mind. I find it perfectly accessible. It just feels weird reading a popular comic or watching a film that talks specifically about experiences that seem specific to being 30. By which I mean to say: I've was there when I was 30, but I'm not there now.

i can't show you my workplace stuff because of NDAs and such, but I just want you all to know I can into Unreal asset editor tools now.

Sadly, that doesn't mean I can fly or throw fireballs, but it does make the world look like a stream of tiny green letters on a black background.

Now that I've quit party politics, I figured I no longer needed a Twitter account, so I deactivated it. The idea is to focus on game development here, and have a general purpose account over at BlueSky.

(not going to make the mistake of relying on one site again)

This is an interesting contrast to Unity, which only has a very basic editor, but at the same time when I built a custom one, I only needed two classes for the whole thing. It was a lot of manual work (literally drawing stuff on a canvas), but it was conceptually simple.

Unreal is not conceptually simple, and I still need to manually piece together a custom node.

In practice, my past Unity projects usually had some kind of custom editor in them, while Unreal projects usually didn't.

I'm building a custom editor in Unreal, and the barrier to entry is quite high. I've already added ten new C++ classes, only to make a rectangle with a name on it appear in a generic graph editor. I can move the rectangle around, but that broke my serialization until I realized I needed not one but two different classes to represent just one (type of) node.

Once I get past the learning curve, it's going to be a fairly powerful tool, but there's a long way to go before it works at all.

@Zeugs @cstross I would guess similarities stem from them having a similar agenda.

The thing about Russians not being allowed to call it a war is an idiosyncrasy of the Russian legal system (it's like setting a weight limit for cars to 20 tonnes, but making an exception for agricultural vehicles, and then insisting your new main battle tank is technically a tractor).

@Zeugs @cstross As a Pole who works (remotely) in a "German" team, together with two Brits, an Austrian[1], a Bavarian, and an Italian (and that's not even my most international" employer to date), I can't help but notice how that would hurt the entertainment industries. But of course that's what fascists always do: they outlaw fun.

[1] The funny thing about Austria and Bavaria is they have a different German there, arguably a separate though related language.

@adaliabooks @cstross When you already have a half-decent translation, you can put another algorithm on top of it that makes simple subsittutions, insertions and deletions, eg. turns "driver kills 3 in a car accident" into "Black driver kills 3".

(how do I know they're black? I don't, and they're probably not, I just blindly inserted "black" because I could)

@isaackuo @cstross I dind't know, so I did a quick check with the most cutthroat MMO I could think of, and apparently real money trading is considered a form of cheating these days, but it's still something they have to deal with: https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us/articles/7370633552284-Real-Money-Trading-RMT

@isaackuo @cstross I'm pretty sure it's been at least ten years since the first time I heard about people using bots to play MMOs for them so they could make money selling items farmed by said bots.

The single silliest thing about the US is how a lot of places in the world are already doing a thing (public transport, universal healthcare, gun controls, proportional voting, winning by popular vote, the metric system etc.), and the thing in question clearly works, and works well, but the Americans still have this uncanny ability to convince themselves that it couldn't possibly work for them.

@nathell @jbiserkov @Svenlaa

DUPA = Defiantly Undoing Polish Acronyms

If 20 years from now I need to ask you "what did you do to stop Trump before his buddies started dropping bombs on my home", and your answer is "I did nothing because the other candidate had problems of her own", I am not going to accept that excuse.