Notices by Jeremiah Fieldhaven (jeremiahfieldhaven@mastodon.gamedev.place)

@sinbad I can't find a violin small enough, so how about a nanoscale guitar instead...

@sinbad ... that's weird, why on earth?! I can see good reasons to provide both, but not exporting the const version seems such a bizarre ommission.

@sinbad That or he's holding an invisible cup of tea, and sticking his little finger out pretentiously. 😆

@sinbad I would like to tell AM that the feeling is mutual.

@psychicparrot42 @crussel Project Shinar is mostly blueprint.

There are some C++ classes in there, primarily a NavigationInstanceSubsystem that handles the grid-based pathfinding and conversion from grid positions to "forward", "turn left", "turn right", etc commands that robots and NPCs follow.

Now whether that's a good idea or not is another matter entirely. So far it's mostly working okay (electric nodes really does help). But I am also a muppet, so it may bite me terribly at some point!

@sinbad So I build and UV models in Lightwave, export them into Blender to rig, animate, and export the .fbx, and then import into Unreal.

Maybe I should add a stage involving Maya or something so I can get all four corners crossed off....

It's midday here, and my office in work has just hit 14C 🥶

@upmultimedia I have an oil filled radiator in the office, but it's really struggling. The building my office is in has notoriously bad climate control (good old 1970s architectural masterpiece that it is)

@dev_ric @upmultimedia Yeah, fan heaters are great, and I'd love to have one.

Unfortunately they are on the Strictly Prohibited list at my employer because they are deemed an Abomination Unto Nuggan and also a Major Fire Hazard (to be fair, they *did* have a fire incident in one building when a fan heater forgot how to do the 'fan' part and really put all its enthusiasm into the 'heater' part...)

Thankfully I usually only need to be on site once or twice a week. Home is proper temperature.

Finally got my navgrid system to work!

The game works out where the navigable parts of the level are immediately after instantiating the level components, and provides a subsystem for NPCs to request a point they can potentially get to, and be given back a list of "move forward/turn left/turn right" instructions they should follow to get there.

Worked great when I get 3D point subtraction ordering and cross-product direction interpretation right... 🤦

Now to add some inodes as a test!

@sinbad I must admit that I'm non-zero tempted to just bang together something a site generator based on Markdown::Perl and a couple of other things when I (eventually) get around to fixing my site, and set up a gitea action to build the site from a project in my gitea instance.

@sinbad You're not wrong, but... sigh.

UK people - the government is running a "Copyright and Artificial Intelligence" open consultation, https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/copyright-and-artificial-intelligence until 2025-02-25

Option 3, their "preferred option" is to allow AI to slurp everything, but require an opt-out (we all know how well those work!)

Option 1 (require abiding copyright law) is "not preferred" because it is "likely to make the UK a less attractive location for AI development".

If stealing shit is the basis of your business model, *perhaps this is a problem*?

@sinbad How're you working out the substitution? Are you using 1g sugar = 1g honey, or by volume?

@bbbscarter If you're making a cross platform GUI tool, I'd recommend using Qt. Use PyQt if you know Python and don't want to go C++.

Anything web-like is going to end up as a bonkers-size electron app.

Left VS2022 going for an hour, by that point it was using 6GB of RAM and was still sat on 100% of one core.

No idea what the hell that thing is playing at (and I can't find a way to tell, and even if there is the UI is so unresponsive I'm not sure I could get to it!), so time to verify the UE5.5 install and the VS2022 install I guess...

So everything verified, project refreshed, etc.

Still doing the same thing.

I suspect that it isn't a coincidence that this seems to have started after updating VS2022 to 17.12.3

Fuck's sakes...

@sinbad I wonder if crisps should be classified as fast food...

@sinbad That looks great!

Bit over a year since I switched from Unity to Unreal, the game is now at the point where enough of it works that I think it might work for other people, so:

https://jeremiahfieldhaven.itch.io/project-shinar/ - Windows and Linux preview builds are now available!

If you give it a go, I'm interested in feedback, suggestions, etc - with the obvious caveat that this is still a very early preview build, so expect bugs!

#GameDev #IndieDev #IndieGame #UnrealEngine5