@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place
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sinbad

@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

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

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sinbad, to random
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I had been considering putting a couple more of my open source plugins on the UE marketplace, maybe juicing up the visual tooling a little for a Pro version and just making it easier for BP-only folks. In particular quite a few people seem to use SPUD so it would probably do OK.

But after the 5.4.0 shock I think I'll hold off, I don't need that stress 😬 Maybe I'll do it muuuuch later when UE5 is boring & not changing much so surprise breakage is less likely (& when cash reserves get lower 😬)

sinbad,
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But hey for now if you'd like to support my expensive coffee habits, you might be interested in the plugin I have published, SUDS Pro, now supporting UE 5.4.

I'm British so it's very difficult for me to say this, but I think it's "quite good". I put a lot of effort into making it so, and almost burst a blood vessel when UE broke it for 6 weeks recently. So there's almost the full set of blood, sweat & tears in there. Don't worry, I wiped it. 🙃

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/suds-pro-dialogue-system

sinbad, to random
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Whenever I renew something and realise that it's more expensive than I expected because their website pricing is all "introductory" offers. It always makes me feel bad about the purchase & the supplier, like I've been tricked into a milking cage.

This is why I like JetBrains, every time I renew it gets cheaper because the renewal discount gets bigger, like a loyalty scheme. That's the way to make customers feel OK about subscriptions.

psychicparrot42, to random
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I wonder if there are any games from the 80s that, if they were released for the first time today, would still be hailed as genius game design (we’d be seeing them for the first time, but not we may already know the genre). And what does it mean if that’s not the case? Has how we perceive games changed so much that our very idea of ‘the core of a good game’ has changed to something more superficial?

sinbad,
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@psychicparrot42 In every decade some games rely on the novelty of the new, or some gimmick, to sell, and none of those hold up, but some were just rock solid games. Some are held back by tech limitations that we gave a pass before but are less tolerable today like sprite flickering or grating sound, but provided there's nothing too egregious the design still shines through. Games are games after all, if it pokes the right part of your brain everything else melts away

sinbad,
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@psychicparrot42 Some 80's classics that I can still play today include Bomb Jack, Defender, Thrust, Pac Man, Dungeon Master, any of the Marios, Bubble Bobble & Rainbow Islands. Sadly most of the ZX Spectrum stuff I used to play aged less well because of the tech limitations but JSW and a lot of the Ultimate games are still great

sinbad,
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@psychicparrot42 oh that’s interesting, I did have Bomb Jack on the Spectrum back in the day and remember liking it but have only gone back & played the arcade version recently

ben, to random
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What's the group noun for British people?

sinbad,
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@ben A kerfuffle

sinbad, (edited ) to random
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So in the last few weeks we’ve had:

Apple pissing off everyoe who likes creative things that aren’t an iPad

Google trashing their signature product by handing the keys to it to a jumped up autocomplete that suggests putting glue on your pizza

Microsoft making a better case for never running Windows again than any of their competitors ever could by pre-loading a fully featured info stealer kit

You can sure tell why the people running these companies get paid the big bucks eh?

sinbad,
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Tech is fundamentally broken as an industry, it’s dominated by a bunch of companies that have no clue what the future looks like except that number has to go up somehow. I can only conclude that they’ve become convinced that repeatedly punching themselves in the crotch somehow juices the stock market because there’s no other explanation for it

psychicparrot42, to random
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I keep an Xbox dev kit on my desk, even though I'm not currently working on an Xbox game. I should probably put it away in a cupboard until I am working on an Xbox game again, but it looks cool and reminds me that I (me! little me in my house with no money and all self taught) can make games for consoles! And that's actually pretty darn awesome, I reckon. So, it's like a little ego boost.. is that vain? 🤔

sinbad,
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@psychicparrot42 I've never had a console devkit so I'm impressed and think you're cool and that

sinbad,
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@psychicparrot42 ❤ It's mostly the beard, like Samson I'd lose all my powers if I shaved it

sinbad, to unrealengine
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Well, thank f**k for that. UE 5.4.2 finally fixes String Table support which has been completely broken (pre-localisation builds) since 5.4.0. SUDS works again!

Please Epic, never do this to me again. I'm of an age that my heart attack risk is only increasing, so I'd appreciate not having the extra shove 😬 #unrealengine

sinbad,
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Huh, they actually don't let me update the plugin for UE 5.1 anymore, the link is read-only. I guess Epic only let you update the Marketplace for the last 3 versions of UE? Makes my life a little easier I guess

sinbad,
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Right, that's the SUDS Pro update for 5.4.2 submitted. 🤞Hopefully it'll be in people's hands in a couple of days.

Header inclusion rules had changed again so I had to fix all that up, I forgot to check the UAT build process previously, I was too busy tearing my hair out over the string table breakage.

Gotta love C++, the way you can have a perfectly functioning build in Rider/VS and then have 150 errors when you build it via RunUAT. 🙄 I'll still take it over refactoring blueprints though 😜

sinbad,
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@psychicparrot42 When you use a C++ project you should really never be launching UE directly, but launching it through hitting Debug in Rider / VS instead. It compiles it for you that way - the direct-to-editor compile experience is terrible if it goes wrong (which it often does).

I highly recommend Rider over VS; you can open .uprojects directly instead of going through the "generate VS projects" step, and it navigates to & from BPs and can search across all code. It's way better

sinbad,
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@psychicparrot42 The main benefit of C++ in UE is that you've got access to everything, and if you need to refactor something it's WAY easier not to break it.

Blueprints are great while you're writing them, but if you ever need to do a big refactor of anything, gawd help you. Things WILL get broken and you'll have to find where in the noodle mess it is

sinbad,
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@psychicparrot42 Rider will definitely help since it understands UE much better. But ultimately it’s just a case of getting used to it; most of the work is repeating known patterns and you get into a flow of it after a while. It’ll still blow up sometimes but it becomes less daunting with familiarity.

sinbad,
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@psychicparrot42 @klord Live Coding now works surprisingly well even under header changes, I’ll often keep it up for a decent time and only restart it when it throws an error or I start getting paranoid. Startup time is only about 10 seconds for me - VCS might hate uassets but they get the job done there

sinbad,
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@psychicparrot42 it’s one of the few subs I don’t resent, it’s good value vs pro VS and it actually gets cheaper the longer you sub - my discount is at 40% now so it cost me US$101 this year. But yeah it’s not cheap cheap, just enough value for me to accept it

sinbad,
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@MouseByTheSea @psychicparrot42 yeah just the command line tools

sinbad,
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@MouseByTheSea @psychicparrot42 the build tools are free but yeah I guess there’s a community license. All the upsell on VS versions doesn’t really apply

sinbad,
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@MouseByTheSea @psychicparrot42 re-read the license and you can basically use the build tools under any VS license, and the community one is free for individuals or orgs of 5 people or less

sinbad,
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Wow it’s live on the marketplace already, 3 hours - it’s usually a day or 2. Not sure if that’s just a fluke or someone felt bad & ushered it through, thanks if someone did 🙂

sinbad,
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@psychicparrot42 thanks mate, it has indeed been a ride

sinbad, to random
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I thought I was being really smart by using sockets on weapons to position melee attacks so that you can just trigger overlaps via anim notifies a little before potential impact, and if you make the overlap boxes big enough you get a nice directional element to attacks for cheap (good for making particles fly and directional knockback)

Reader, this does not work well under varying frame rate conditions. After this I'm definitely going to test the game with t.MaxFPS=20 more often 🤦‍♂️

sinbad,
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@alexr they’re just skeletons so no organs, but yeah - the main reason for not decimating any more is shared vertices on the joints that I couldn’t break apart until our 1 artist gets time to split them

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