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  Unreal is the kind of engine that does super complicated stuff for you almost automatically, but then fails to register a click on a button in the UI and you have to spend a day or two trying to figure out why.

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  That feeling when any layperson from outside the project would tell you to gtfo because this doesn't even look like a game, let alone play like one, but you're just so happy to have crossed a milestone (i.e. levels in my dungeon crawler can now be multi-storey). Decent wall materials are next. ^_^ (I started this project in Unity a few years ago, but then Unity went nuts and then I was busy; now I'm recreating it in Unreal)

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  This atlas was generated automatically by a naive algorithm that leverages a heuristic about the texture set that's being processed. Efficient development means I'm not going to complicate the algorithm for the sake of optimisation, unless I actually need a more efficient solution.

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  @thejessiekirk @stilgherrian I think 1989 CEE revolutions are more relevant to today, and they all featured: - pop-culture, including what we would call memes today, as a recruitment tool - protests that de-prioritised (but crucially did not rule out) violence, such as general strikes - building their own propaganda with movies, songs, "second circulation" etc. - negotiated compromises that involved going to the polls The Romanians did execute their dictator, but that was...

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  Finally managed to switch the personal project from manual to automated texture management. The success here is that everything looks the same as before, hence no screenshot. Took me two and a half weeks instead of a week, but I feel excused: I was taking it easy after stressful period at work.

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  Weirdly enough, Gamescom is giving me FOMO this year. I never had this with E3, PAX or GDC. Could be just a simple case of Gamescom being easily reachable, either by plane or by train, i.e. it feels like a place I could actually be at. Plus I feel like I don't know enough people in EU gamedev.

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  Unreal prototype is now officially more advanced than the old Unity version. I've added a texture importer that speeds up asset creation. Materials support a detail layer and tinting. Next thing to do is cutouts so that I can have doors and windows without adding variants for each texture. The wall material doesn't tile correctly, but that's an issue with the data and not the code. The range of view is limited and it shows, but that was the case in old crawlers as well...

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  The main advantage of Unity over Unreal is that Unreal essentially forces you to read its engine code and in doing so exposes all the parts where it's held together by spit and duct tape, whereas with Unity you live in a state of glorious ignorance.

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  Today's success: managed to display the level (which is a custom asset in my case) in a custom editor's 3D viewport. Made easier by 3D viewports in Unreal having a UWorld of their own, and me having a separate Actor class whose sole responsibility is to display the level.

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  That feeling when reading a bunch of wrong advice on Unreal forums helped you realise that some other advice you took from there was also wrong, while repairing the damage from said advice also fixes the issue you were trying to solve in the first place as a side effect. *sighs in C++*

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  Solo dev means doing a lot of work outside of your area of expertise. In this case I've spent last three days improving my texture packing algorithm. This is a heuristic that takes the nature of the set into account, complexity is technically O(N^2) but close to O(N) in practice. There are two edge cases I'm not handling, but I'm only going to add that if it becomes relevant in practice.

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  We live in the stupid timeline, part over 9000: some random store that seems legit but I don't even recall buying from them, sent me best wishes (and a sales offer) on the occasion of my name-day. My name-day is in February.

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  Big success today. My pet project uses an old-school presentation style that emulates 3D graphics with sprites. Problem is, the further away you let the player see, the more sprites you need. Old dungeon crawlers usually had a view depth of only 3 tiles. In fact, old dungeon crawlers faked perspective and scaled their sprites uniformly! I took inspiration from this trick. This view uses correct perspective for depth <= 7 tiles, and then switches to uniform scaling. Total view depth: 12 t...

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  I just added a debug message "check filenames on disk" and realised my PC doesn't even have a "disk", because SSDs have replaced them. It sometimes amazes me how transient modern tech is. When I was a kid, we still used tape. Uncle had a floppy disk drive and it seemed so high-tech.

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  A custom tool like this can speed up a designer's work by an order of magnitude. Most teams I've worked with were reluctant to invest in tools, but I'm giving them priority, because I'm broke. Also wanted to learn new Unreal tricks. Can't wait to build an actual level now (hopefully soon). This project has gone from zero to this in about 3 months, but a lot of that was me learning all kinds of Unreal weirdness. If I were to reapply knowledge to a new proj...

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  tired: red, green, blue, alpha wired: lavender, geranium, basil, transparency

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  My prototype uses tilemap levels. Each tile has an entry for each of the four walls. In the current implementation, each entry is a struct. When you build a wall and then delete it, the struct changes wall type to none, but doesn't clear other params, such as the tint. The bug was that east walls were being tinted with the colour of the north wall from the same tile. Even if the wall wasn't there, there was leftover colour from before it was deleted. Result: walls in seemingly r...

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  Talked to a friend yesterday - a sensible guy who has a crucial experience advantage over me, namely he was in the army at one point (as a volunteer). Given the media reports and his intuition, he thinks Russian attacks on Poland in the Autumn are plausible.

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  Things I like about my job: coming up with new gameplay, implementing features, composing assets, fiddling with the balance, watching the players enjoy the result. Things I hate about my job: that moment when the initial version is done and now I have to test it and find out that it doesn't work.

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  @pare @angusm @cstross Given how clueless authoritarian decision makers can be about reasons why regular people have kids, I wouldn't be surprised. Here in Poland the authoritarian right is convinced they can make people have more kids by simply paying them to do it. (plot twist: no amount of money works when abortion is banned, housing is expensive, and jobs are insecure)

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  Twitter incels: some old guy in his late 20s told us big boobs are sexy, so now we're going to throw a tantrum every time a video game character doesn't have them. bsky HoMs: hooves. cat ears. belly fat. all hairstyles you can imagine. tattoos. piercings. muscles. more muscles. hips that could birth an aircraft carrier. and also boobs

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  You've already heard such Polish bangers as "kurwa" and "not my circus, not my monkeys", but have you heard of "to jebnie"? Pronounced "toe yebnyeh", it describes the feeling of dreadful anticipation when someone has fucked around and is just about to find out. (don't use in front of your babcia)

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  Current US regime is a WH40k Chaos cult. Epstein files? Slaanesh. All those random attacks on other countries that make no strategic sense? Khorne. RFK Jr.? Nurgle.

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  @rayckeith This article seems to be from almost six years ago. Is there a follow-up?

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  Testing the feature I'm currently working on requires me to have as many bad random rolls as possible, which is perhaps why I keep getting a higher than expected number of good ones.

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  Mini Metro is a power fantasy of being able to move the tunnels under the river around at will and at no cost.

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  Against my better judgement, I bought Europa Universalis 5 without waiting for a month, and now I'm stuck with a bugged saved state after I restarted from an earlier attempt where I had to put up with at least two other annoying bugs.("at least" because with Paradox it's sometimes hard to tell a bug from a feature). Now I have to wait a week for the first major patch.

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  In our Discord server, one person remarked our frequency of patches makes them think we're Borg, and another person answered that no, we're just German. Obviously this is all just goofing around, no harm done etc., but still: should I tell them that I'm Polish and our main QA guy is Italian? Or should I tell them that this German team is being led by an Austrian?