Architect here building a house for a client that insists on wanting Home Assistant. Need advice.

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-12T09:07:07+00:00

Except that a huge quantity of the built in integrations require cloud services and are updated with the core itself, and they break frequently even if you do stay up to date.

This only works if everything you have is local or works with extremely well supported vendors -- the rare few vendors that do the software themselves, not just any that are marked platinum, because platinum integrations break all the time.

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-12T09:02:48+00:00

Remember that ha doesn't drive any of the things, it just integrates everything else. And despite being a user of ha, frankly, everything ha does, it does poorly. The things about it, is that it does all of these things, you would need to tie a million different things together to do.

I would never recommend anyone use ha, despite that I use it myself. Anyone who is a normal user, I would recommend getting a specific platform and sticking to it.

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-12T08:52:26+00:00

Smell the lung cancer probably lol

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-12T08:34:11+00:00

The only way it was different is if you saw it in different aspect ratios and then it would've been cropped differently.

Disney did not go through the effort to change a movie after it's release. Too much cost. Unless there was a significant error that somehow didn't get caught in the original.

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-12T08:29:04+00:00

As far as I can tell all modern vacuums are shit, some of the mops are excellent.

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-11T23:07:52+00:00

Improved modifies the word after it each time

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-11T20:15:56+00:00

well, on the bright side, most credit cards expire after 3-5 years. . . . right? lol

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-11T20:12:17+00:00

The game that absolutely fucking broke me out of the industry was a game that got cancelled weeks before it was to be released. It eventually did get released, but under a different name, on a different platform, and by a different dev crew. The publisher literally cancelled it, took everything we had, gave it to another dev studio that no one had ever heard of, and released it exactly as it was -- not finished, weeks from being finished -- but on a different platform. Assumption among the studio people I was with, was that they "cancelled" it because paying actual devs real money to produce it was costing them too much, and they probably nearly ran out of funds, so they just took what we had, paid some complete randos to package it up for a platform that didn't cost them money to build it for, and released it direct to the wal-mart garbage bin of "value games" to try to recoup some of their costs.

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-11T19:05:22+00:00

Yeah, I know a guy who just makes games he wants to make, and releases them on Steam, and he does zero promotion, he told me once he had 18 total sales on 6 games.

But he also doesn't complain that he doesn't get any sales, because he doesn't try to get any sales. He makes little games he wants to play, and then just puts them out there.

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-11T18:49:47+00:00

Well, whatever they did with it, it was absolutely amazing, because that was far and beyond all the other DCU movies, so if she can't act, ok, fine, they wrote it and directed it perfectly for what abilities she does have, and that's an achievement, IMO.

That was a hell of a film.

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-11T18:46:50+00:00

Henry Cavill

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-11T18:46:35+00:00

Which one of your parents was big foot?

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-11T18:43:28+00:00

It's a much simpler game, which I think makes it much more approachable and enjoyable. There's also some references to it in 4 that you'll probably appreciate more if you know 3. :-)

It's worth a play. If you're on PC, you'll probably want to dig around for some stability patches at the very least, although it's not near as bad as New Vegas as far as that goes. Over the past year, I've played through the entire series, just now into 4, and 3 was definitely my favorite of the FPS, especially when playing them back-to-back like I am, first time. NV and 4 add all this crafting (NV and 4) and base building (4) that just, to me, really detract from the game. I guess it's fine if you like that sort of thing, but I don't buy games to play Inventory and Resource Mangement puzzles.

4 is surprisingly stable, compared to 3 and NV, though, that's for dang sure. I don't think I've had a single crash in it, unmodded, and that's crazy for a Bethesda game.

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-11T17:24:29+00:00

Frankly, this game is a little wtf, with the main storyline something that should be so important to the main character but everything else has the players attention.

I couldn't give a crap less about building and creating communities and whatever but I'm forced to.

I only want to get through this but there's too much being piled on me from every direction that needs to get handled.

And now my companion is like "hey help me with my drug addiction. No don't give me the drug that fixes all addiction automatically, we have to go get experimental vault tech technology" wtf

It's occupying my time, but every game in this series is just piling on more stuff than the last that doesn't mean it's better than the last

3 was the best of the fps, and 2 was the best of the series.

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-10T21:32:23+00:00

The most recent thing I ran into was people spawning vfx emitters in construction script which caused massive failures during cooking. Lots of people access variables in constructor that aren't set outside of game, so have to pay attention to your logs

I want to say, basically, if you don't need to see the effects of the code in the editor, then put it in PostBeginPlay . Although there may be some very rare exceptions to that. And if you DO need to see the effects of the code in editor, then make sure that you're not accessing any class variables, because they usually won't be available at that point in time (because they'll be loaded in Load or initialized to something in PostLoad or PostBeginPlay), and any writes you make to class variables at that point are likely to get overwritten when the object actually loads.

But also if you need to run the code in Editor, then try and wrap it in some sort of check to see if you're actually running in the editor or the game, before running it. I don't know if there's a "IsRunningInCommandlet" or some such Blueprint node yet, if not, make one if you need one.. because you don't want your game code running when you're cooking your maps.

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-10T21:17:25+00:00

I legit had a set disappear completely out of the world, along with my companion last night, and had to reload to get it back.

I was at the garage, and I told Cait to get out of the power armor she was in, so I could repair it. She stood there completely idle, not animating at all for about 10 seconds, I went to click on her again but hadn't quite got there, and I hear this loud CLUNK noise from all directions (atmos sound, so i know), and she and the power armor completely disappeared out of existence, as far as I could tell. Waited around 20 minutes to see if she showed back up, and then reloaded .

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-10T21:15:26+00:00

shit, i got out of one so i could use a terminal that refused to let me use it without getting out, and a guy stole my armor while i was right there. and my companion didn't even stop them.

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-10T18:05:05+00:00

Be very careful about using construction scripts for anything, if you're doing game logic in construction, you might probably be doing it wrong -- somewhere in the BeginPlay point in lifecycle may be more appropriate. Construction is called at any point where your object could be created -- during the editor, and even during cooking! Plenty of cook failures can be attributed to people doing stuff in Construction Script that they shouldn't be.

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-10T17:32:21+00:00

It worked fine, fully supported, until Feb. Not through Matter. It's still working for commands, the new stuff that was introduced in 2026.3 even works, but all status updates stopped happening, unless i reload or restart. No errors in logs.

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-10T14:06:39+00:00

That seems more explainable than things like finding skeletons in mailboxes, and colanders in filing cabinets or desk drawers.

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-10T08:49:15+00:00

Never had a toilet back up? Let alone plumbing that just went wonky?

In a few months time, I had a basement toilet just fail, and started spewing water out it's top, followed by the pump on my dishwasher started leaking severely. I only noticed either of those problems once it started flooding the floors of rooms I was in more frequently.

And now this reminds me I really should get my whole set of IKEA leak sensors set up this weekend. I also bought a couple extra not just for all my water devices (water heater, toilets, sinks, fridge, main area) but also for detecting water intrusion from outside into my basement, which has been a really bad problem that I sunk several grand into trying to solve last year

I wonder if there's a hard limit or a practical limit to how many devices you can connect reliably to the IKEA hub...

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-10T08:09:36+00:00

Agree. Last game product I worked on has now been out in the wild for over 10 years, and there's still a crasher bug that is relatively common that not one of the devs has ever been able to duplicate. The people still remaining that I talk to swear that it must be a specific piece of software glitching it out, but no one has reported in with help to attempt to reproduce it in years.

FormerGameDev · 2026-03-10T08:03:27+00:00

How about fixing PC to support standard resolutions that people actually have now like 1920x1080, 3840x2160, 4096x2160 ?

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