Notices by Jacek Wesołowski (jzillw@mastodon.gamedev.place), page 9

@cstross Absolutely not saying this is a good idea in any sense of the word "good", but I can't help thinking about the potential to target not airliners, but private jets.

@kwramm I'm not talking about a specific project. I've been in a few dozen projects, and two-week sprints have never done any of them any good. They just stress people out.

There are a lot of agile software practices that make a lot of sense, but I'm not a fan of the idea of two-week "sprint".

I end up having a dozen features half-done, because each had to be ready by the end of the "sprint". I'd much rather spend three weeks each on eight of them, and have the other four dropped entirely (or handed over to someone else).

This isn't just a quality vs. quantity trade-off, because a well-done feature saves time spent on future related features.

@blotosmetek @cstross You're talking formal status vs. reality on the ground. The local proverb in Trój miasto is "you live in Gdynia, you work in Gdańsk, and you party in Sopot".

@cstross The "big city has another city growing right next to it and eventually they merge" is so common that a lot of the time people don't even notice. The entire east side of Warsaw has its own identity for that reason, and people there are occasionally grumpy for being treated like a mere district.

In Poland there's even a tri-city and people call it just that (i.e. "Trójmiasto").

@bigjsl @cstross Not quite how it worked out for Witcher. The original shortstories / novel featued a bunch o strong opinions, including a matriarchy being the lesser evil, one of main characters being in a same-sex relationship, and most of all, a very strong anti-racist stance. Definitely A Book With a Message..

On the internet, you'll find a ton of fans of the games, who have never read the books and will eagerly tell you how women, black people and gays have no place in Witcher.

If anyone's interested, Unreal has this postprocess thing it calls the tonemapper that's supposed to make it mimic some advanced cinematography stuff, but in my specific edge case it just washes the colors our. It's possible to replace the tonemapper with one's own post process material, but then said material needs to apply gamma correction on its own. Applying pow(1/gamma value) to your scene texture more or less does the trick, though actual gamma is a bit more complex than that.

Unreal 5.3, a billion dollar engine, the near-infinite power of modern 3D graphics under my fingertips, and here I am, doing my best to turn all the fancy color space eye adaptation post-processy stuff OFF OFF OFF, so that my 2D planes with some non-mip-mapped textures set to "nearest" can look as close to what the system image viewer is showing me as possible.

Google's problems started long before the AI. For the last year, I've had a job where I'm basically learning Unreal programming from the ground up as I go. I could use decent documentation, and it doesn't help Unreal doesn't have one, but Google is making things worse by prioritising seemingly random (and not particularly relevant) results.

Its main "trick" is when it shows forum posts from 8-9 years ago, about a different version of the engine.

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.