Notices by The Seven Voyages Of Steve (sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place), page 4

@neilhenning I just can’t do it, even in text, feels too weird for me to be saying it.

I usually go with “folks” but am working up the courage to use “chums” or “me hearties”

@GeekAndDad even when they’re not active - Merry likes to sleep on my feet some nights and makes me too hot

@YurkshireLad Galaxy brain move

Before we insulated the place it used to need so much more active heating. Cold walls, damp, it was not great. It’s an old block house with no cavity so we decided to externally insulate it; basically wrap the house in a warm blanket. The difference in cost between thicknesses was marginal once you’d decided to do it so we went for the thickest available. Totally worth it, it’s absolutely transformed both cost and QoL (damp is totally gone). The walls now act as a thermal battery

Still haven’t put the heating on even though it’s November. It’s still getting up to like 15C during the day here rn and not going below 11-12C at night so with the insulation we installed 10 years ago the latent heat from PCs, cooking, showers etc seems to keep the place topped up just enough. Helps that we WFH. Occasionally it gets slightly chilly (drops to about 19-20C in the house) but just put a PC on and you’re good 😄 Maybe in a week or two it might need to be on for an hour a day

@eniko the writing has been on the wall for a while, but still sad to see the hammer finally come down. I used to love macOS (or OS X, really) when they tried to be useful to devs but they’ve fully disappeared up their own asses now. Now I’m left with either being gaslit by Windows for an easyish life, or made to constantly fart about with technical nuances I don’t care about to run Linux

I have been to the new coffee shop that is literally 60 seconds walk from my house and can report that a) their coffee isn’t as nice as mine and b) their cake selection is a bit underwhelming.

Frankly I am relieved and my waistline may yet remain within the confines of three dimensional space

@SonnyBonds in the past I’ve done Qt, wxWidgets and “just write it twice” and sadly the latter was the best outcome. I don’t know if there’s a good answer which is why Electron gets used so much despite its problems

@dev_ric I mainly started with it to chill out more in the evening with nice mood lighting. However stuff like being automatically dimmer when you turn it on later has been really useful

@pmdj at this point in the timeline it’s very much a theoretical party

My kind of crowd

I feel like people who claim that the social network with the most people in it is inherently the best might not realise that some of us prefer to be in the kitchen talking to the cat at parties

Well, I ripped out the periodic Gameplay Effect and hacked together my custom ticking stat drain client prediction (with server side ping compensation) and it already looks waaay better than it did before, no lag on begin/end and generally way smoother. Server has final say at the end and at thresholds but the client behaves way better. Am I a proper multiplayer game programmer now? 🙃

@MyCody thanks, I’m still using the AttributeSet right now because I didn’t really like separating it, and my manual local prediction seems to be working. I didn’t know you can temporarily override replication though, I should probably be doing that to avoid the attribute replication spam that I’m essentially ignoring

I'm thinking I just don't use GameplayEffect for this at all since without prediction it's useless. Instead I have server & client ticking read a tag that the ability sets, and do their own calculations. I'm not sure if there will be a little fighting over the value during attribute replication because of lag - on the server I guess I could account for that by incorporating the average lag in the start/stop calculation 🤔

Who'd make a multiplayer game eh

I guess I just have to roll my own prediction? Say I have a drain effect which periodically reduces a bar by X every second. The server ultimately decides the drain (attributes replicated) and I can smooth the bar animation, but unless I predict it there's a nasty lag i both starting and finishing the drain. I already predict the action start/stop locally so there's no lag, but that's built in GAS. Ticking down the bar immediately while the ability is activated needs to happen locally 🤔

I *thought* my periodic gameplay effects (Gameplay Ability System) weren't being locally predicted on a multiplayer client (quick ticking was janky). I wasn't doing anything wrong, it's because #unrealengine specifically disallows local prediction of periodic gameplay effects. Not mentioned anywhere that I could find, but it's right there in the source code 😐

This makes periodic effects a bit useless in multiplayer, except for coarse-grained loosey goosey things. Time for another approach

@thisnorthernboy Often it's just learning to post-process the original asset (e.g. make LODs, bake tiny gribblies into textures etc) but it always starts from the original model and works from there so it's just an extension to your process, not an invalidation of it. And UE now even actively promotes plugging original high poly meshes directly in and letting the engine sort it out. But it's a lot of experimentation & iteration for everyone since the tech is constantly changing anyhow

@thisnorthernboy A lot of people would (correctly) comment about art not needing to be "for" anything, but I'm a practical programmer who struggles to motivate if there isn't any end goal in mind. I can say that having been around gamedev a long time, your models would be great in a space game. I wouldn't worry too much about specialist asset knowledge; games & film etc aren't as far apart as they used to be asset wise and you can usually make most things work in the pipeline

@cloudthethings yeah we went with Hue too, only 15 here although that’s way more than I ever expected to buy when I started experimenting with it last year