stonith

I've been making an arpg as a solo project for ages (https://streamable.com/b9hae) and using the GameplayAbilities plugin that comes with the engine. I do the abilities (which tend to be heavy on delegates, so visual scripting is perfect for it), the UI, and the animation blueprints in BP, while everything else is cpp. I follow the model of creating all base classes in cpp, then having the final implementation as a data-only blueprint. This lets me rapidly change the values of things in BP in the editor when I'm fine tuning things, without having to deal with BP otherwise. So if I have a fireball spell for example, the fireball actor will have all its logic in cpp but the visuals, sounds, base damage, explosion radius etc. are all set in the editor in the bp, but the ability that lets me cast the fireball will be in pure bp.

In Australia we have ordering kiosks now at a lot of stores, so maybe that would be one avenue where it's easier to cater to a customer's specific tastes by warping the menu a bit.

I'm not suggesting it's a good idea, just that it's an option.

Doubling the authoring workload is inevitable for anything particularly important. It's discussed once, then distilled down to a more consumable form a second time. If a new employee joins it's not like they're going to read two years of slack backlog to get going.

Might be making games. UE4 for example can eat up quite a lot of memory when doing things like building lighting and whatnot.

IIUC they modified CryEngine to support a 64 bit coordinate system, and part of the reason this was possible was because they hired ex-Crytek devs to do it. Doing the same conversion in Unreal might not be feasible. I believe this is needed for the 'space scale' kind of stuff they're doing. So as far as why they chose CR, it might have been because they had access to devs that they didn't have in the case of UE3/UE4.

As far as modelling goes it makes no difference - they're all made in 3dsmax/maya and then imported and both engines would be heavily optimised for that pipeline.

I had a similar reaction when I saw a video of snappers rig[0] in Unreal 4 a couple of months ago - I don't really play many AAA games these days so I guess I must have missed where the rigs advanced to the point where modelling wrinkles in the face became feasible. Their tech[1] seems to be used in a few AAA games and looks pretty convincing to me.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo_FALeUc8c

[1]http://snapperstech.com/

I bought a top spec iMac a few years ago for working on Unreal 4 projects in my spare time and doubling as a dayjob machine, and sure enough I wanted a better GPU a couple of years later and went and bought a PC. Amusingly UE4 is actually one of the sample screenshots in the linked page. Nothing Apple does can really compensate for the rate at which GPUs get quicker, and putting an AMD one in there is doubly irritating since that's not what the majority of the market uses.

So each time you want to upgrade your GPU, you're also having to purchase a new screen. The difference in my case was between having about 10fps with a lot of debug draw in the UE4 editor on the iMac, and about 90fps for the same thing on a new PC with a 1080.

About the only good thing about the iMac was that it held its value remarkably well, and I sold it for half the purchase price 3 years later.

"We are now at about 8 million estimated users and still growing at about 100 percent a year. We haven’t passed Java in terms of users yet, but by this time next year at the current growth, we will surpass."

It's not clear whether 'user' means node.js developer or someone deploying the software or something else altogether. It's also not stated where this number came from, and I'd imagine it would be fairly difficult to measure anyway.

Standard at pretty much every company in Australia. Generally impossible to get a complete exemption, but you can often carve out exceptions. When I was at Cisco it was 100% of anything made at any time, other places have been slightly less encompassing.

You can do both 1D and 2D blendspaces in Unreal, so you end up with something like this: https://80.lv/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/walktorund2.gif

Very handy for character locomotion, but only gets you so far. I'm not sure how applicable offline processing is to this though, since if you have a large number of different types of obstacles to be traversed, you'd have to bake >= that number of animations, and your animation state machine would be enormous. The end goal might be to do that in real time, but I don't think anyone is going to seriously suggest running a neural net to calculate animation positions while the game is running. Maybe if you had some smarts in the level designer you could determine the potential pool of animations needed based on placed geometry, and build the animations at packaging time along with the state machine.

If the reputable publishers banded together and created a single platform that I paid for, where my payment was weighted towards the sites that I actually read articles from, then maybe they wouldn't be in so much trouble. Instead they each create their own platform and ask for a price that simply doesn't represent the value they provide, then bitch that nobody's taking them up on the offer.

Spotify works because they have large enough catalogues that I don't need to also have an Apple Music and a Google Play Music subscription, whereas the New York Times is basically just a donation since I'm inevitably going to have to go elsewhere for other journalism even in the same categories as they report on.

For the case of video, Disney + co have been attacking consumer rights for nearly a century via lobbying and as a result I don't care if they all go out of business. Fuck them for making copyright the 70+ year joke it is today.

Fair enough, although Facebook don't have any devs here, so I'm not sure they belong on that list. I found a bunch of places are similar in that they only have sales staff here - RedHat has most of their devs in Brisbane and Cisco has more in Melbourne, for example. Looking at Amazon's jobs page it seems like there's dev roles in Sydney at least, and Google definitely have devs here.

I'm in Sydney and was under the impression the scene in Melbourne was much better! The grass is always greener...

Access to talent in locations where there aren't offices + access to talent who only work remotely.

It's off topic for everyone not based in the US. There are more appropriate forums for this discussion.

Australia has an H1-B equivalent called a 457 Visa with similar requirements.

I agree the kickstand is horrible. I bought an aftermarket case (manvex) which makes it much easier to use on non-flat surfaces. I think there's other brands with similar things.

K8s has a significantly more solid base today than OpenStack did upon its public release by NASA. It was barely functional, and gained the ascendency by virtue of Eucalyptus somehow managing to be even worse.

Maybe some per-user jitter in the ordering so that different people are seeing very slightly different things at the upper end, giving those posts the chance to be seen?

Krita is getting there but it's no Photoshop at the moment.

I worked on it for a few weeks while contracting at Cisco. At the time it was a set of tools for deploying a Mesos + Marathon cluster, and K8s was being looked at as a sub-in replacement for Marathon. I think that's now been done + much more.

There wasn't any particular magic in it, more that it was a neat package of terraform+ansible tooling for getting mesos and the surrounding ecosystem going. This was about a year ago, so things may have changed since then. I do like the idea of not inventing your own paas, but rather having a consistent framework for deploying whatever kind of paas you need on whatever cloud is available.

Not OP, but I tried Annex with Unreal 4 and the symlinks caused problems with the editor. Obviously that's a UE4 issue rather than an Annex issue, but it meant LFS was the only reasonable option at the time when I tested (~12 months ago).

I made myself a set of shortcuts using Hammerspoon so that I could push windows to each of the 4 screen corners as 1/4 width, push to left half or right half of screen, or make full screen. This is really enough of the tiling WM experience (I had come from Xmonad) for the majority of situations.

I taught myself the basics by picking apart the sample projects in the learn tab of the launcher. Specifically I started with a top down template (c++) for my own project and then looked at how the strategygame sample worked, gradually porting features across to my own project and adjusting as needed. I think a lot of people do something similar with ShooterGame, since that's a really simple multiplayer shooter and also gives you an idea of how to structure things for network replication. I had even heard that the Ark: Survival Evolved binary was actually still called ShooterGame, but I don't know how accurate that is.

The UnrealEngine youtube channel is also fantastic, and their training streams are very good. The documentation is OK, but you're better off reading the source most of the time for anything lower level - the headers are generally pretty well commented.

The physical animation component they showed off on the stream this week looked great.

I've been developing a game using UE4 on a 2012 iMac for the past year and I get about 60fps@1080p in the editor on the highest settings. I can comfortably run DS+2 Clients to test multiplayer when I scale it down to Low. The only really slow thing is DebugDraw calls, which I haven't found to be a blocking issue, though it it certainly annoying.

I'm in a very similar situation with a 2013 iMac and UE4. Particularly when using any serious amounts of DebugDraw (such as when the EQS Testing Pawn is used) the performance drops like a stone. I'd get a new Mac, but there's nothing worth paying for, so I'll probably end up trying to get pci-passthrough working with a Windows VM on a Linux base machine.

'Eugene Kim' should be Yoo-Jin Kim aka SoS.

I escaped the boredom by becoming very proficient in a popular open source project that I found interesting and that multiple companies are looking to hire for. While the business requirements for the features I have to add may come from my employer sometimes, for the most part I'm really just working on upstream and making it better. I've also job hopped a fair bit to try to find a job where there was motivation on both sides before getting to this point, so your tale is somewhat familiar.

Perhaps you could aim for something similar. There's employers out there (eg. RedHat) that will happily pay you to hack on open source if you can show that it's in both of your best interests. That way you get to choose what you're working on going in. Even just specialising a bit more might make things more interesting as you'll be hired to work on <thing you actually quite like> instead of some random stack put together by someone who may not have a clue.

Good luck in your search :)

The upstream on cable is not fast enough for screen sharing anything requiring visual detail. It maxes out at 2Mbps or some garbage which means collaborating on something visual is a pain in the ass. ADSL is even worse. For code you can use screen or tmux, but working together on a CAD model or whatnot isn't a great experience.

(I say this as someone happily working from home in the East)