Steve's Blog

March 26, 2021 Manipulating Bits and Bytes C++ Title: Wikipedia - Bitwise Operation Wikipedia - Bitwise Operation Description: Wikipedia's page on bitwise operations. Title: Bitwise Operators in C/C++ GeeksforGeeks - Bitwise Operators Description: The basics of bitwise operators and using them in C and C++ with some guidance on more involved usage. Title: sizeof operator cppreference - sizeof operator Description: Definition of the sizeof operator used in C++ to find the size of an something in bytes. Title: Bit Manipulation By: Make School Youtube - Tutorial #1 Description: Basic introduction to bit operators as well as how to use them together for simple manipulation. Summary These are several of the more encompassing sources I came across recently on the basics of working with bits and bytes, especially in C++. More directy memory management and bit manipulation is not something I come across often using C# in U...

March 22, 2021 Highlight Selection Architecture AI Project Overview I was having a bug come up with our selection highlight effect where sometimes when moving around quickly, several objects could be highlighted at the same time. This is not intended, as there should ever only be a single object highlighted at once, and it should be the object the user is currently hovering over with the mouse. Bugfix Assessing Bug Case Since it happened generally with moving around quickly in most cases, it was difficult to nail down the direct cause at first. After testing a while though, it was noticeable that the bug seemed to occur more often when running over an object that was non-selectable, onto a selectable object. Further testing showed this was the case when directly moving from a non-selectable to a selectable object right afterward. This helped isolate where the problem may be. Solution It turns out in my highlight selection SelectionManager class, I was only unhighl...

March 17, 2021 Intro and Blue Prints Unreal Title: Unreal Engine 4 Complete Beginners Guide [UE4 Basics Ep. 1] By: Smart Poly Youtube - Tutorial Description: A quick introduction to using the Unreal engine and just getting acquainted with the main editor window. Title: Unreal Engine 4 - Blueprint Basics [UE4 Basics Ep. 2] By: Smart Poly Youtube - Tutorial Description: Quick introduction to using Unreal's blueprints. Title: Unreal Gameplay Framework By: Unreal Unreal - Link Description: Unreal Gameplay Framework, the official Unreal documentation. Learning the Basics It has been a while since I have used Unreal in any significant capacity, so I am going back to the basics to try and make sure I have all the fundamentals covered. Tutorial #1 Moving/Positioning Objects By default, Unreal has all the transformation functions snap. So moving an object, rotating it, and scaling it all occur in steps as opposed to smooth t...

March 16, 2021 Intro and Basics Unreal Title: Unreal Engine 4 Complete Beginners Guide [UE4 Basics Ep. 1] By: Smart Poly Youtube - Tutorial Description: A quick introduction to using the Unreal engine and just getting acquainted with the main editor window. Title: Unreal Engine 4 - Blueprint Basics [UE4 Basics Ep. 2] By: Smart Poly Youtube - Tutorial Description: Quick introduction to using Unreal's blueprints. Title: Unreal Engine 4 Beginner Tutorial: Getting Started By: DevAddict Youtube - Tutorial Description: A more in depth intro to getting through the Unreal editor and starting to apply it to some general case uses. Title: Unreal Engine Beginner Tutorial: Building Your First Game By: Devslopes Youtube - Tutorial Description: A good introduction focusing on building more of your own assets instead of using the Unreal given assets. Title: Unreal Engine 4.26 Beginner's Tutorial: Make a Platforme...

March 15, 2021 Working with UI Architecture AI Project Working with UI Since UI looked organized into 4 major groups vertically, I used a Vertical Layout Group for the overall control. I then filled this with 4 empty UI objects, one for each major UI group. Vertical Layout Group Anchor Preset: stretch/left (anchors to the left, but expands for full vertical screen space) Pivot: (0, 0.5) (Moves pivot point to the far left, so width controls how much it expands out from edge, and Pos X can just remain 0) Child Force Expand: Width (Helps expand everything to fit the full width) Child Force Expand: Height (May not be needed) Control Child Size: Width (May not be needed) Padding: Left, Top, Bottom (Keep everything slightly away from edge) Controlling the anchors and pivot is extremely important. After setting up the vertical layout group, a lot of the individual control is necessary for the horizontal organization. The anchors, the x position in particular, can be ...

March 11, 2021 Build Issues Architecture AI Project Overview After working on the project with a focus on using it in Editor for a while, we finally decided to try and see if we could build the project and work with it from there. Initially it did not provide anything useable. It would build, but nothing could be done. After a while, I isolated that the colliders were giving trouble so I manually added them for a time and that helped set up the base node grid. The file reader however was unable to provide data to the node grid, so only one aspect of applying data to the pathing node grid worked. These issues made the build fairly unuseable, but provided some aspects to approach modifying in order to fix the build. After some work focusing on the issue with applying colliders and reading/writing files, I was able to get the builds into a decently workable spot with hope to get the full project useable in a build soon! Unable to Apply Colliders with Script: Working wit...

March 10, 2021 Rigid Body Physics Unity Title: How is Drag Calculated by Unity Engine? Unity Forum - Link Description: Explanation of someone's testing of Unity's rigid body drag value. Overview I was just exploring Unity's physics through Rigidbodys and Physics Materials to see what different feels and effects I could get with them, and decided to delve a bit further into them. Rigid Body I was just doing very general testing without much research this time around just to see what I got from using the different values. Mass acts pretty much how you would expect, as it requires more force to accelerate the object and stops it faster when friction is involved. Drag Drag and Angular Drag however were a bit trickier. While Drag did reduce the acceleration of the object as it moved, and eventually the velocity as force stopped being applied, it did not appear to matter what direction or shape the object's facing direction created. I tes...

March 04, 2021 Free Music Source Music Title: Youtube Audio Library Youtube - Audio library Buffer - 13 Fantastic Places to Find Background Music for Your Video Content Description: Source of free music by youtube to use as background music for videos. Overview It was suggested to me that adding any kind of sound or music to videos that otherwise have no audio is a good addition just so users do not think they may be missing any audio. I wanted to find a consistent source of free music to add to the background of videos and came across this library supplied by Youtube. It is my understanding that this music is fully public domain and creative commons. I also found a link for several music sources through Buffer. That has been provided, and that is where I discovered Youtube's audio library. This could be a good source to find other sources if I misunderstood any of the legality of the Youtube audio library.

March 03, 2021 Shaders for Game Devs Shaders Title: Shader Basics, Blending & Textures • Shaders for Game Devs [Part 1] By: Freya Holmér Unity - Forum Description: Discussions and code for drawing and rendering many cube meshes. Overview I have been exploring shaders as an option for efficiently generating large amounts of geometry and came across this recent talk covering shaders all the way from the beginning. This seems like a good opportunity to at least get a better understanding of what they are and good cases to look into using them. Intro to Shaders Shaders: code that runs on the GPU in their truest form This was there answer for the simplest form of explaining what a shader is from a game development point of view, and I liked it as a good starting foundation to help my understanding. Textures, Normal Maps, Bump Maps, etc. are all examples of tools that can be used as input for shaders. Shaders then use the information provided by those a...

March 02, 2021 Drawing and Rendering Meshes Unity Title: Drawing 1 Million cubes! Unity - Forum Description: Discussions and code for drawing and rendering many cube meshes. Overview I wanted to be able to replicate the drawcube Gizmos in Unity I am using to portray data for my architecture project in the game scene and eventually builds of the project. To do this I need a very lightweight way to draw many small cube meshes, so I looked into drawing/rendering my own meshes and shaders. This option I came across in a Unity forum to just draw and render meshes on Update seemed decent enough so I investigated a simpler version for my needs. Implementation I could get away with a much simpler version of the CubeDrawer script found in the forum comments. I could strip out the batching and the randomization as I need very specific cubes and no where near the million cubes they were rendering. I am normally looking at somewhere in the thousands to ten-thousands, ...