smugdev

@Zeredek She can't complain. Went up with her plane in disrepair. Pilots are responsible for their planes. 😔

@Drainyard As a very smart man once said: "Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow."

This is a very important lesson that everyone needs to learn as early as possible.

@OlexGameDev A lot of PSO compilation stutter is tech debt though. From a time when shaders had to be monolithic and you still had to avoid dynamic branching in them at all cost. Things have changed and you can massively reduce the number of required PSOs now.

Game devs don't have the power to fix shader compilation but are expected to fix the instability of gaming platforms to make their games be forever playable.

@DMeville @myriadbytes @nafonsopt I also haven't used SVN enough to be able to compare Ark to it. My comparison point is git (mainly on Windows) and Ark is a lot faster and a lot simpler.

@DMeville @myriadbytes I only hosted it locally so far, because I wanted to see if I like the workflow/it's worth paying attention to. (I won't switch mid-development.) The Discord would be a good place to ask. Or contact the dev here (@nafonsopt ).

My server host that I've been using SVN with for all my version control (for the last decade!) apparently decided they are fully removing SVN support. I found out today when I couldn't connect to my repo! So annoyed, having to deal with this instead of getting actual work done :|

@myriadbytes @DMeville If you're fine with trying new things, Ark is worth checking out. Very simple to set up, very easy to use and very fast.

@DMeville Yeah I have only heard bad things about Git LFS. Maybe you could take a look at Ark VCS, which seems to have been made as a better replacement for SVN ?

@CRUMVIII Where I live, it's meant to get hotter each day for the rest of the week.

@smug_dev I hope not. It's already pretty terrible today. If it's somehow even worse, I'll have to postpone work for a few days cos PC running isn't exactly helping when it's adding to the heat. 💀

God it's so hot...Feels almost impossible to work right now. And I'm indoors atm. Dunno how construction workers even manage.

Feel like the time is right for this. Seems to be a market for a workhorse engine for small professional teams. Any engine programmers interested in joining? I'm starting it up myself, but any helping hands are appreciated.

@Pepe_The_Third @JonDevX @Kappische Do you recompile every exe before running it? The solution would be for there to be a GPU ISA, but I doubt the vendors will do that. Next best thing would be for devs to reduce the number of shader permutations, since GPUs have gotten a lot better at dynamic branching.

@JonDevX @Kappische How? The games needs to optimize GPU shaders to your own device.

This is also super annoying!

@jnvcia @AntonHand Is it okay if I DM you with some game engine questions? It's not about yours although you have piqued my interest. 👀

@smug_dev @AntonHand Working on it, been super busy with life stuff in the meantime. Probably looking for one or two people to collab with. So far I've got a classic inheritance-based entity system, a renderer, memory/resource management, and massive amounts of analysis paralysis

Very good signs about Unreal Engine's current code quality...

@jnvcia @AntonHand The direction Epic is taking UE is making me rethink engines again. I remember you talking about considering to make a simpler engine for people who don't need all the bells & whistles of modern general purpose ones. Was that just an idle thought or something you might do.

@AntonHand Not like the quality was much better before LLMs, the clankers were probably trained on UE and UE plugins for game programming. Maybe that's why they suck

@aizen76 I am not concerned about Actors and BP changing. I hope the new system will fix the many issues. I am concerned about the direction towards a universal platform. UE is very bloated. Working with it can be quite slow and unpleasant at times. I'm afraid this will get worse.

@andkalysh @toncijukic I suspect something like this might make compiling BP to C++ directly hard. You probably don't want your designer-facing visual scripting language to inherit the insane parts of C++'s type system, UB and other BS. And you want it to be predictable across platforms and compilers.

@andkalysh @toncijukic And the edge cases/weirdness matter, because it has to be transparent. You have to generate C++ that emulates the all the quirks of C# while not allowing the quirks of C++ to affect the output.

I think people are mixing up “Blueprints going away” with “visual scripting going away.” Epic may deprecate the old Blueprint/Actor framework, but I doubt they remove node-based workflows entirely. More likely: nodes stay for designers/artists, but instead of running through the Blueprint VM + classic Actor model, they compile to Verse or some UE6 intermediate layer. Verse would sit closer to a gameplay scripting layer: cleaner, more scalable, and probably faster than BP VM, but still not as fast as C++. Actors are bloated, and a lot of UE gameplay architecture is built around them. If Epic wants UE6 to scale better, replacing or slimming that model makes sense.

Day 29 was Minotaur day! 🐂💪 This one was a doozy! Pretty happy with the result but it took quite some time, I think over 5 hours. Worth it though! I could see him being a mid-boss in a videogame #b3d #lowpoly #psx

The dark knight by @murgoten Such a charming character 🥰 I originally made this 3D model 2 years ago 🤣but I was never quite happy with it. After a lot of tweaks, trial and error and experiements I think I reached a good spot though!

@jnvcia @bookmarkerbot1 It would help if there were more high-quality pre-made engines or game frameworks to choose from. Then indies not rolling their own engine could pick one that is more appropriate for the particular needs of their project.

@bookmarkerbot1 @smug_dev Yep. There should be a better way. I think it really depends on the specific project though

Saw this video pop up in my feed. Not going to make any value judgements on Philip himself, since I know he means well. However, game engines aren't just a black box you plug GFX into and a game comes out. UE's issue is that it's being used for games that don't require it. cont.