@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place cover
@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

sinbad

@[email protected]

Greybeard. I’ve made engines (Ogre3D), devtools (Sourcetree, Git LFS), now games, Unreal Engine tools & plugins. Baker, coffee nerd, Cat Dad. He/him

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

Tearcell , to random
@Tearcell@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Im currently working on trajectory systems and forgot what tan() does and I kinda am embarrassed about that. Also I'm awful at trigonometry apparently. Haven't thought about it in a couple decades!

sinbad ,
@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@Tearcell I’m still using the “soh cah toa” mnemonic they taught me in secondary school to this day (sine=opposite/hypoteneuse, tan=opposite/adjacent)

sinbad , to random
@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

A persistent muffled miaow behind me indicates that Pippin has brought me one of his toys as a gift (it was in his mouth). He won’t stop until you acknowledge his gift 😄

He does this all the time, he has lots of little wool toys Marie made for him and he carries them around the house, sometimes in the middle of the night (and telling us all about it) 🙄

djlink , to random
@djlink@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Well I guess they finally broke it enough that I can't use it, so my undecision of "I'm still kinda checking it but maybe I shouldn't" has been made for me xD

sinbad ,
@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@djlink oh well 🙃

fuzzybinary , to random
@fuzzybinary@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Can any console game devs give me some insight on the state of using Rust on consoles? My understanding is that Unreal has replaced some code with Rust, so it must be doable yes?

sinbad ,
@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva @fuzzybinary There was a 3rd party effort to integrate it a couple of years ago but I don’t think it went anywhere.

I think this is good reading if you’re considering getting into it https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev/. I get the impression that people using Rust for gamedev are in danger of prioritising love for Rust over gamedev productivity

jonikorpi , to random
@jonikorpi@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Sooo how do we protect the web from AI-enshittification? A new search engine? Perhaps powered by human curation? Easier self-publishing via better social media? Something else?

sinbad ,
@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@jonikorpi I think the people that understand what’s going on and don’t like it will build human-scale peer-to-peer enclaves like this one and largely disappear from the “mainstream Internet” which will be mostly comprised of bots and ads. Maybe we’ll occasionally fire a probe into that horrid place for commercial reasons but it won’t be where we’ll live

sinbad , to random
@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

I’d heard a couple of people say that Xbox was basically not worth aiming for anymore as an indie, unless they offer you a chunky Game Pass deal - which they probably won’t, unless you’re a known quantity by reputation or sales on other platform me. This article backs that up; good to know if like me you’re an outsider to console dev and would be going in blind https://www.patreon.com/posts/do-game-still-to-104149801?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

eniko , to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

For my birthday, I'd really like it if my beloved fedi could spread word far and wide of Kitsune Tails. It's a platformer with a heartwarming story featuring queer main characters and personal discoveries in classic SMB3 style. You can find trailer, screenshots, and wishlist links here: https://kitsunegames.com/kitsunetails

It's coming out this year and the team and I have been working hard on it for several years now. Most of the team is queer in some form so by boosting you'd not only be making me happy on my birthday, but supporting a bunch of queer creators making queer art as well

yuzu kitsune tails, a purple haired fox girl, picks up samurai armor in a tower that's rapidly filling with lava. she jumps away from the rising lava and sticks her spear in the wall, doing a dashing twirl to get on top of it. she walks off the spear and into a new scene, fighting a ghost fox with armor and spear. it stabs and she jumps over, but is caught by a follow up stab. the ghost fox over extends and its ghostly powers wane, giving yuzu a chance to bop on its head

sinbad ,
@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@eniko I thought you were supposed to have the day off…

Happy birthday!

sinbad , to random
@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Mood

C++ code: UENUM(BlueprintType) enum class EMinerCreatureMood : uint8 { /// Sight turned off, not doing anything Asleep = 0, /// Patrolling etc - senses enabled but calm Passive = 1, /// Has received some stimulus to investigate, but not fully aggro'd Suspicious = 2, /// Aggro'd by direct stimulus, chasing player or last place seen Aggressive = 3, // Ho boy Enraged = 4 };
ALT
  • Reply
  • Expand (1)
  • Collapse (1)
    • eniko , to random
    @eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

    me: tries to pay power bill, 3 cards that all normally work fine declined

    me, emailing the payment processor: hey we're trying to pay our bill and 3 cards that normally work fine were all declined, are you guys having a glitch

    payment processor: your bank declined the payment contact them

    me, trying again two days later: payment goes through fine

    i am so tired of this particular type of chucklefuckery

    sinbad ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @eniko I once spent 20 minutes on the phone to my bank manually yay/naying a whole bunch of pre-approved payees because I hit some kind of limit on the number of them you're allowed (for subs etc), turns out they just never delete them even after you don't use one for years. Bank support person was very nice and prob thought it was just as stupid as I did

    sinbad ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @eniko yeah I dread those calls because I expected the usual train wreck of a call centre merry-go-round with terrible garbled speech but in this case they were lovely, I was stunned

    eniko , to random
    @eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

    fuck it post deleted it's not worth the risk just to vent about the gatekeepers of success in gamedev

    sinbad ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @eniko Sigh. It was kinda like this the last time I considered giving gamedev a shot (mid 2000s, when unless you had contacts to get on PS or Xbox you were hosed), then when the wheel turned in the 2010s I was too busy with other projects and missed the window. Maybe the wheel will turn again by the time we finish this game but it sucks that there can’t be more consistent support for indies

    eniko , to random
    @eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

    me: hey windows can you copy and paste this file into my usb drive

    windows: got it, copying your entire D: drive onto the usb drive

    sinbad ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @eniko just imagine what it’ll be like once “AI” starts “helping” with everything

    djlink , to random
    @djlink@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    s***

    sinbad ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @djlink Redfall was disappointing but I loved their previous work, very sad.

    sinbad , to random
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    Looking up guides on Elite Dangerous and constantly getting advice that says “the minimum you need to be effective is insert equipment with a price tag of 10 million credits” which is not that useful 🙄

    Reminds me of the “you could buy a house if you stopped eating avocado toast” line of financial advice

    sinbad OP ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    I’ve upgraded my ship to a Cobra Mk3 at least so I have enough cargo space to do some trading, but I’m only making low tens of 000s at a time. I tried my hand at bounty hunting & got completely wiped by my first band of pirates (I could have taken 1 or 2, but there were 5), so I don’t think I’ll be going that route. Started mining but completely misunderstood collector drones so wasted a bunch, and the UI for managing what you discard is wonky enough that I mostly lost what I did retrieve

    sinbad OP ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    I realised I needed a refinery with more bins to avoid having to manually discard the minerals I don’t want every time I pick something up (& risk binning the wrong one). Why can’t you tell it what to keep & auto discard the rest? And apparently the key to not wasting drones is to NOT direct them to specific chunks, or they self-destruct after each? This game is needlessly obtuse sometimes. But I’ve mastered manual docking and flying about, even landing on planets and the ships sound good

    sinbad OP ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    Honestly I think it’s the sound that’s making me want to keep playing the most. Every ship I’ve had (only 3 so far) sounds different but all are extremely satisfying. The noise they make when you drop out of hyperspace, or when they shut down on docking especially. Top notch fwoom / djeeoooow type noises you’d make with your mouth if no-one was watching.

    The sounds that space itself makes (yes I know) as well - it’s like sci-fi whale music. The sound folks really over delivered on this one

    eniko , to random
    @eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

    i have just now found out that what i really should have been doing with my life is be a freelance tech documentation writer

    sinbad ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @eniko it’s pretty darn clear every day that we need more of those

    sinbad ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @eniko it’s nice to know I’m not the only coding weirdo who actually likes writing the docs

    sinbad , to random
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    I wish it was normal for PC cases to come with this kind of power switch. So satisfying.

    Plus, cats wouldn’t be able to flip these like they can so easily with push power buttons

    Metal lever toggle switch on an espresso machine

    sinbad OP ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @Doomed_Daniel well, they’ve never flipped my coffee machine switches but they pat vertical surfaces too when they think they see something

    djlink , to random
    @djlink@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    Helldivers is gonna force Steam users to link to a PSN account. this is bad service, imagine someone who purchased weeks ago, used the 2h refund window and now gets the terms changed this way? https://steamcommunity.com/games/553850/announcements/detail/4196868529806518742

    sinbad ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @djlink I really liked the look of this game but the tech shoehorned into it is not something I want (nProtect, PSN account)

    sinbad , to random
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    I just made my little crossbow skellys try to avoid shooting each other and strafe around corners, starting to look half-decent as enemies now. There's so many little details that can go wrong, e.g. I had to pull in the query for positioning to comfortably under their attack range, because otherwise sometimes they would pick a spot that was right on the edge of their range, but pathing/collision meant they were slightly off it and technically out of range, so would sit there not shooting 🙄

    djlink , to random
    @djlink@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    a long time ago, for a brief period of time, there were 4 main consoles, Dreamcast, Xbox, PS2 and GameCube. You had to be there, this was an era full of games doing all sorts of mind-blowing things.

    image/jpeg
    image/jpeg
    image/jpeg

    sinbad ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @djlink PC was doing alright then too. I had 2 of those plus a gaming PC, what a time to be alive, so many games

    sinbad , to random
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    I was motivated to give Fallout 76 a chance after the TV series but after a couple of evenings I think I’m done. It feels like Disney made a Fallout theme park where people are weirdly nice (scavengers just giving you stimpacks?) and everything has already been done before but the actors are trying to make you feel like you’re the protagonist, it’s just weird. And also incredibly bland for the usual MMO reasons

    sinbad OP ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    My usual trouble with MMOs is that nothing you do truly matters because it can’t, nothing can change the world state otherwise it would change it for the next player. So yeah, a theme park that has to reset every day. They even give you a kitschy map showing you the park layout. The icing on the cake was a nuclear blast went off while I was playing as a daily event which initially I thought was interesting but it was over the next hill so it was fine. Just totally anaemic

    sinbad OP ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    I’ve been thinking about why I don’t like MMORPG gameplay. It's not that I want RPG stories that make you the one special snowflake the world pivots around, that's trite. But I do like to see change in the world as a result of my actions, even if I’m just Joe Doofus cutting about. In the absence of being able to allow individuals to permanently affect the world I think MMOs/live service games rely heavily on you caring about tuning your character, being the one thing you can permanently change

    sinbad OP ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @eniko I guess that’s one way around it, but it seems like if making anything matter requires fragmenting the world or the perception of it, what’s the point of making it MMO and not just regular co-op

    eniko , to random
    @eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

    i dont understand achievements. i dont understand why the act of playing literal video games needed to be gamified

    note: please don't explain achievements to me. it will not help me understand, it will only annoy me

    sinbad ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @eniko I think they’re nice when they recognise non-essential or unusual things that you do, it’s like a little nod and a wink from the game designer saying “I see what you did there”

    djlink , to random
    @djlink@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    hum... I wonder if I missed it, or if this separate rider backend process is new, almost 1GB, the project itself it the other one 🤔

    sinbad ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @djlink @code_disaster I'm still on 2023 and Backend is there, it just used to be nested underneath the main Rider exe (edit: and mine is using 6GB 🙄)

    eniko , to random
    @eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

    been doing a thing where when i get up from my desk i set a timer and kinda walk in circles for 5 minutes for my (mental) health. seems to work ok. nothing earth shattering but better than just sitting immobile at my desk all day

    (please don't come at me with the "you need to do way more than that" that always crops up whenever someone who doesnt exercise tries to add a small bit of it into their routine cause it doesnt meet some supposed daily quota for maximum health benefits)

    sinbad ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @eniko I tried Pomodoro for that and it was quite good but always seemed to kick in at the least convenient moment and was a bit artificial. Instead I now make sure I have stuff to do at regular but somewhat flexible times during the day: making coffee, feeding the cats, checking the mail, patting the cats, doing the next stage of a bread bake etc. Concrete reasons to get up for 10 mins with fringe benefits

    sinbad , to random
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    The nice thing about Mastodon is when the valley bros on that US non-profit board inevitably persuade the rest that it needs to fire out a for-profit LLC to gain access to additional investment or something and begin the enshittification, we have the option to fork it and go our own way. And wall off the enshittified instances if we want. True distribution means you can cut off the head and the body doesn’t die (which is why Bsky doesn’t work like that and never will IMO)

    sinbad OP ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @lritter it is now, they just set up a US non profit with a couple of valley bros on the board

    sinbad OP ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @lritter @runevision slippery slope is about unintended consequences; it’s less the existence of the non-profit itself and more the choice of board members. 2 of them are the sort of people I’d expect to intend for this to be step 1 of a roadmap to something less open

    sinbad OP ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @lritter @runevision I’m not saying it will happen, but I am saying we need to watch those guys very closely for the emergence of Typical Tech Bro Bullshit

    sinbad , to random
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    PSA: Microsoft may be constantly determined to make the Windows Start Menu worse, but thanks to competing corporate silos another enclave within the company makes the solution: PowerToys Run, so that you never have to use the Start Menu again: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/run

    sinbad , to random
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    F**ks sake they changed something pretty fundamental between UE 5.4 Preview and UE 5.4 Final - the ability to have multiple objects in an asset file, which SUDS relies on - the dialogue and string table are in the same asset; now the string table is gone.

    I was worried they might do this because they started hiding them in 5.3 (not a problem) so I tested 5.4 Preview but everything was fine. Now it's completely broken in 5.4 Final, every single dialogue line is <MISSING STRING TABLE ENTRY> 😠

    sinbad OP ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    WTF is the point of putting out a Preview version if you're just going to add a breaking change in the final?? Raging.

    sinbad OP ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    I'm too angry to code right now, table flipping and coming back to this tomorrow when I can think rationally

    sinbad OP ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    It's not even what I thought. I updated my code to separate out string tables into a separate .uasset file instead of embedding in the same one as the dialogue, and the problem is exactly the same.

    So I started to debug it. And in both cases, in the debugger I'm seeing the correctly resolved text from the string table. And yet when I pipe that into anything - widget or Slate, it comes out as <MISSING STRING TABLE ENTRY>. WTF is this quantum level shit?

    Slate displaying the same text
    User widget displaying the same text

    sinbad OP ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    The problem seems to be when the FText goes through TextData-&gt;GetDisplayString(). Everything seems totally fine in the FText itself, but when converted to a string that way it just falls over. I can't see anything wrong with the internal data, the string table reference is fine, the table is loaded, everything looks peachy but then it goes bonkers on conversion to FString

    sinbad OP ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    So, FTextLocalizationManager::GetDisplayString is the one that's shitting the bed. In between 5.4 Preview and 5.4.0 they changed the fallback behaviour (when it doesn't find a localised string) from returning the source string, to by default doing nothing and resulting in a null return. There used to be a blanket "else" which caught this case, now it has a a condition that can basically never be true (it requires the current language to be "keys" for some bizarre reason).

    5.4 when not using compiled localisations
    bShouldKeyifyAll requires the current language ("en") to be "keys" WTF

    sinbad OP ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    If you compile localisations, everything works. English and other languages. The problem is that this is a pain in the arse to do, you absolutely don't want to be doing this just to see your native text on the fecking screen. I have no idea who changed this at the last minute or why but it's completely broken FText based on StringTables until you build localisation. It can't be just my usage??

    sinbad OP ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    Here's the commit that broke it, for those with access https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/commit/4701ba824a65f46387bbf98ecc92be77b39a3842. Funnily enough I used to talk to the author on Twitter ages ago but I don't think I have a route to him now. I'm going to try commenting on the commit to see.

    sinbad OP ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    Oh thank goodness, it IS a bug and has been fixed, but it missed 5.4.0 which released with basically broken FText/StringTable support 🙄 https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/commit/a51ed8442674fe9ef21fbe4934961d59118ad084

    sinbad OP ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    Christ alive they've shipped UE 5.4.1 and didn't merge in the fix which un-breaks FText + StringTables (pre-localisation compile). The fix is a one line deletion, it's been in ue5-main for over a month, but it wasn't merged and thus my marketplace plugin is still completely broken in 5.4.1 because it relies on FText displaying the source string from a string table before you build translations in the localisation dashboard. Everyone who uses string tables will have this problem. Madness

    aras , (edited ) to random
    @aras@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    Ok, the fact that the "AI" (NPU) chip controller inside Intel's new Meteor Lake CPUs uses SPARC instruction set (from 1990?) was not on my bingo cards for this year. https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/04/22/intel-meteor-lakes-npu/

    sinbad ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @aras Big PhysX accelerator card vibes

    djlink , to random
    @djlink@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    Embracer name is so tainted right now they're rebranding in 3 companies so they can keep doing what they've been doing. https://twitter.com/Wario64/status/1782281799877415084

    sinbad ,
    @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @djlink I had no idea Coffee Stain was Embracer now, so they seem to have hidden that quite well already (I like a lot of Coffee Stain games and thought they were still independent)

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • tech
  • kbinEarth
  • testing
  • interstellar
  • wanderlust
  • All magazines
    •