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

@glassbottommeg Unreal is definitely the kind of engine where as soon as you start diving a little deeper into its functionality (in my case it was custom K2 Nodes and custom editors), you begin to need an emotional support group.

It would be called Unreal Users Anonymous, because we all have NDAs.

I'm generally enjoying "Indiana Jones and the Great Circle", but it's by no means perfect, and one of the most glaring examples of that is a certain location where they pour sand on you and you need to reach an exit, which is high up. None of the mechanics you know at this point are used here. You just need to keep jumping like crazy because that keeps you on the surface of the sand until you reach the exit. You'll keep dying every 10 seconds until you figure that out.

@emil Dealing with history of any kind is like running an old age emulator.

I'm old enough to have used a PC that did have A: and B: drives.

You know what I really hate about programming? Realising there's a glaring bug in my most recent code just before I go to sleep.

@gregeganSF When I started my Facebook account I gave it a fake birth date, so now it thinks I'm in my 50s. It keeps showing me lots of ads for products that seem to be meant for young women. I'm not sure if Facebook thinks I have a daughter or an affair.

@nixCraft Various tech industries and their segments are in different stages of the hype cycle. For instance, in my current team there's no "AI code", unless some of the programmers are using "AI" as a tool in the same way they're using Intellisense and such. This isn't going to change before the end of this project, so the very first moment someone might try to introduce "AI code" is next year. By then the companies further down the curve will have their first results / disasters.

Unreal tidbit: opening a widget blueprint in the editor (with the goal of editing that blueprint) can result in calls to that blueprint base's functions, so you better have nullptr/IsValid checks on everything external to your widget that you might be setting up in your init step.

(IsValid() checks are a good practice anyway, and this is just one of the easier ways to see why)

@wroong @futurebird
> approximate what an interaction with a human can be if human is a sum of all written language and knowledge

Wouldn’t sum of all written knowledge include understanding integer numbers to the point of being able to multiply two digit integers?

Written knowlegde is still more than pattern matching and autocomplete. It’s not even written knowledge, it’s only shape of the written knowledge.

"Indiana Jones and the Great Circle" made an interesting choice where they gave you more ways to earn XP than they did ways to spend it. Which means once you get to spend it, you're not trapped asking if you really need this or that skill. Who cares, it's almost free, might as well try it out.

As far as immersive sims go, this one's pretty casual, and I have no problems with that for now. Let's see if the second biome manages to keep things interesting.

@aniav A lot of what is wrong with startups today boils down to the fact that quite often at least one of the investors at the other end of the chain would happily join the literal NSDAP in the 1930s. In terms of this analogy, it's as if the nazis had a 51% stake in Rene's cafe, which would also explain a lot of his trouble.

One of the ways in which politics and work intersect each other in my case is how I can no longer even consider going to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. With my track record of doing left-wing things and taking part in anti-authoritarian protests I'd probably not only lose my stuff, but also waste a few months in some detention centre in New Mexico.

@williampietri @cstross The rewards were there from the start. I'm thinking about John Romero, whose "exploits" are fairly well documented, Cliff Bleszinski (whom I never met but my coworkers did since we were working for Epic at the time), Peter Molyneux (the ultimate over-promiser), Ken "let's make our voice actress cry" Levine, and many may others, and don't even get me started about pre-Witcher 3 CD Projekt.

@williampietri @cstross I've been involved with the (PC side of the) video games fandom since mid-90s and I've been working in and around gamedev since 2002, and the terrible people have always been there. As much as it pains me, an archetypal hacker and a techbro are two sides of the same person. I've seen one turn into another when subjected to certain pressures.

I've played "Indiana Jones and the Great Circle" for a few hours, and it's a fairly basic, but overall competent and enjoyable immersive sim that does a better job of balancing stealth and action than some others.

This is partly because they know you want to keep punching fascists, so the game treats it as a choice and not as a last resort.

@Natasha_Jay Operates entirely on fuzzy logic.

@siwa @aniav Znam to, ludzie są zaskakująco wyczuleni na rzeczy odstające od założeń / oczekiwań / przewidywań, nawet jeśli odstępstwo w niczym nikomu nie wadzi.

@aniav @siwa Z mojego punktu widzenia jak inni mówią, że jest zimno i trzeba się grubiej ubrać, to ja nie odczuwam zimna, a jeśli ubiorę się "tak jak wszyscy", to się pocę i przegrzewam.

@aniav @siwa Mogę podzielić się hipotezą ws. Brytyjczyków. Do szortów przy 2C nigdy nie dotarłem, ale np. w ogóle nie posiadam "zimowej" kurtki. Sekret polega na tym, że spędziłem wczesne dzieciństwo w mieszkaniu bez centralnego ogrzewania.

Today's small victory is having learned how to do a thumbnail renderer for my custom assets in Unreal.

I had to piece together information from two different user posts explaining the process. The process itself isn't complicated, but Unreal is notoriously poorly documented. It's crowd-sourcing at its worst, especially given how Google search results are no longer reliable.