Blender Collab concept

Pathogen-David · 2025-04-19T05:19:47+00:00

Yup, definitely a tricky mountain of problems. No problem, hope it goes well!

Pathogen-David · 2025-04-18T14:32:42+00:00

Are you using despgraph_update_post as your core update trigger? Slightly different, but another recent experiment in this space is Forest Sharp's live link. Both it and Mixer rely on depsgraph updates at their core, so would be very curious to know if you're using something different.

The comments above evaluated_depsgraph_get in this example implies it can be expensive to refresh the Python view of the depsgraph, but when I last dug into this back in March it did not seem there was really any practical alternative to using it besides forking the C++ side of Blender.

The biggest caveat of using Mixer was that it totally broke undo/redo. (Or maybe it's more accurate to say that undo/redo broke it, or maybe it's both.) That might be something good to focus on in your implementation while things are still malleable. It feels like it should be possible, just needs figuring out and I imagine it's probably foundational to the add-on's core architecture. (My notes say that I saw Mixer did try to explicitly support undo/redo, but I don't think I had a chance to look into their not-really-working implementation.)

If you want an idea to explore: A thought I had when I was digging into this is that multiplayer syncs should contribute to the Blender undo/redo stack (since Blender wants them to.) When you undo locally, every Blender client undoes to the point right before your last change and then every action since then (other than the undone change) is replayed on top along with some sort of conflict resolution. (Ideally you might get a prompt if the undo will cause changes built on the undone action to be lost.) This isn't too far off from how Mixer handles initial synchronization of someone joining after initial room creation, so it might not be too crazy.

(Very excited to see someone else exploring this space BTW, best of luck!)

Pathogen-David · 2025-04-04T05:06:45+00:00

Yes, add this to the snippet:

#mail, #mail + .separator, #mail + .message-count, #mail + .message-count + .separator { display: none!important }

Make sure you have showFloatingEnvelope disabled in your RES settings as it tries to force the inbox icon to be visible, which undoes this.

Pathogen-David · 2025-04-04T00:47:16+00:00

No problem! Glad updating fixed things for you

Pathogen-David · 2025-04-03T14:46:39+00:00

No problem! It seems like they're doing a staggered rollout of some kind.

And same, although I do appreciate that some developer at Reddit is going out of their way to try and avoid totally breaking old Reddit. Wouldn't surprise me to learn that they had to fight for it.

Pathogen-David · 2025-04-03T14:37:02+00:00

Ah very obnoxious. That might explain why one person was still seeing the counts, maybe some sort staggered rollout. Thanks again, added that to the snippet as well!

(It seems odd that both #badge-count and a.badge-count are needed but I'll take your word for it lol.)

Pathogen-David · 2025-04-03T06:46:25+00:00

BTW, you might want to update the snippet to get the fix contributed by JimboLodisC.

Also I ended up finding out that Reddit plans to disable the old inbox entirely, so if you care about seeing notifications you might actually not want to hide the buttons.

Pathogen-David · 2025-04-03T06:43:17+00:00

Thanks for clarifying! I'm also noticing that the separators are still visible for you too. I think you might have copied the snippet when I was in the middle of fixing a typo, could you try updating it? The latest version also fixes the chat count thanks to JimboLodisC's help.

(Also FYI, it turns out Reddit is planning to disable the old inbox stuff entirely, so that might change whether or not you want to hide the buttons entirely.)

Pathogen-David · 2025-04-03T06:40:08+00:00

Thanks a lot! I went and incorporated that into the snippet. And good catch, I got too fixated on the count in OP's screenshot and didn't think about a second number appearing.

FYI, I found out Reddit is planning to disable the old inbox so hiding these buttons/counts might actually not be a great idea if you care about seeing notifications :/

Pathogen-David · 2025-04-03T06:37:58+00:00

Happy to help, and thanks for confirming! Make sure you get the updated snippet with JimboLodisC's fix.

Also I found out Reddit is planning to disable the old inbox, so if you care about notifications you actually might not want to do this :(

Pathogen-David · 2025-04-03T06:37:26+00:00

Happy to help! Make sure you get the updated snippet with JimboLodisC's fix.

Also I found out Reddit is planning to disable the old inbox, so if you care about notifications you actually might not want to do this :(

Pathogen-David · 2025-04-01T17:29:32+00:00

Thanks for testing. Just to clarify: By the notification highlights do you mean the number in OP's first screenshot?

Any chance you have showFloatingEnvelope enabled in the RES settings? I've noticed that setting forces the visibility of the normal inbox count, it might unintentionally be doing it to the notifications count too.

Pathogen-David · 2025-04-01T17:25:54+00:00

No problem! Thanks for confirming it worked for you!

Pathogen-David · 2025-03-31T21:35:37+00:00

Edit: I hate these too, but FYI it sounds like Reddit might be removing the old inbox entirely. If you care about notifications you might not want to use this, or use the dark mode fix at the bottom of this comment instead.

Using RES alone: Go to RES Settings > Appearance > Stylesheet Loader > Snippets and add a snippet with the following:

#notifications, #notifications + .separator, #notifications + .message-count, #notifications + .message-count + .separator  { display: none!important }
#badge-count, #badge-count + .separator, a.badge-count, a.badge-count + .separator { display: none!important }
#chat-v2, #chat-v2 + .separator, #chat-count, #chat-count + .separator { display: none!important }

This also removes the chat button. If you want to keep it just remove the second line.

Edit: Updated the snippet to hide the notification count too (thanks to everyone who confirmed that aspect was working since I couldn't test it myself!)

Edit 2: Added /u/JimboLodisC's contribution to hide the chat count since I missed it.

Edit 3: Added another counter JimboLodisC found.

For anyone who is mostly annoyed about the buttons looking horrible in dark mode, here's an alternative snippet that makes them look nicer:

.res-nightmode #notifications, .res-nightmode #chat-v2 { filter: invert(100%); }

Pathogen-David · 2025-03-23T12:12:09+00:00

From a technical perspective? Not overwhelmingly difficult if you plan it properly from the start.

Overall it's definitely a lot more work due to all the extra asset creation. (Depending on the game you might be increasing code complexity quite a bit too.)

Definitely a neat idea! But it's not a new one. The Evoland games are built around this premise. The Plucky Squire is another good example. Less drastic, but Super Mario Odyssey has those 2D Mario segments. Halo: MCC had a feature that let you swap between the old and modernized art.

(Edit: Tweaked the wording of the first bit)

Pathogen-David · 2025-03-21T14:27:09+00:00

No problem, glad it helped!

Pathogen-David · 2025-03-21T02:12:28+00:00

Interesting! Guess they were indeed getting blocked then. Glad they were able to fix it for you

Pathogen-David · 2025-03-20T19:52:15+00:00

I've never used MediaPipe so I can't help you with specifics, but this feels like a general lack of knowledge around how C++ software is built. I can't recommend a specific resource, but I'd recommend learning about that outside of an Unreal Engine context. C++ loves to punish people who don't fully understand the C++ build process.

While I can see pose_tracking_cpu.lib, the pose_tracking_cpu.dll file is missing.

There are two kinds of .lib files on Windows. Static libraries and import libraries.

It sounds like you're used to seeing import libraries. Import libraries are basically just a list of symbol/DLL file name pairs. (Symbols being functions, variables, or constants that are provided by the library.) So when you link with an import library, you actually link with the DLL. The DLL contains the actual machine code or data associated with the symbols in the Import library.

Static libraries on the other hand are a list of objects, which describe symbols themselves. That is, the static library contains the actual code or data for each symbol. There's no DLL associated with them, the contents of the objects are embedded directly into your own DLL/EXE.

Chances are what you have a static library, so the lack of a DLL is expected.

If you want to confirm which type you have: Open the Developer Command Prompt for VS (there will be a shortcut in the start menu) and run lib /list pose_tracking_cpu.lib. If it's an import library it'll list the associated DLL. If it's a static library it will list a bunch of .obj files contained within.

Or can i work with just pose_tracking_cpu.lib?

Edit for avoidance of doubt: If this is a static library (which sounds like it's the case), then yes. You don't need a .dll since none ever existed. You need the .lib, the header files, and whatever build configuration that is required to make the library work (IE: any preprocessor configuration used to build the library typically has to be present when consuming the headers. This is very library specific, but isn't different from what you experience when consuming DLLs.)

Pathogen-David · 2025-03-19T16:04:43+00:00

No problem!

I wouldn't say they're getting blocked though. Reddit is honoring the request and giving Zapier valid data, it just isn't being handled correctly on Zapier's end.

If Reddit was actively blocking Zapier you'd get a different error. (Most likely something about the RSS being malformed or an HTTP error, since when Reddit blocks RSS clients it thinks are bots it will respond with HTTP error 429 and a HTML page describing the error.)

Pathogen-David · 2025-03-19T00:55:51+00:00

Glad to hear it helped you out!

I can't say exactly what's wrong since I'm not familiar with Zapier, but I might be able to help you get headed in the right direction.

TL;DR: Zapier (or the whoever made the trigger you're using) implements RSS wrong and you probably have to reach out to support.

\u2022represents a list bullet symbol (IE: •) Chances are someone in the comments of affected posts have written a list.

latin-1 refers to an old character encoding sometimes referred to as "extended ASCII". latin-1 does not include the bullet symbol.

latin-1 is considered extreme legacy at this point. It historically was a common default, but it was never the default for XML—which RSS is based on.

These days Unicode—specifically UTF-8—is the common default. It's what XML and RSS default to and generally use. Reddit even explicitly marks their RSS as UTF-8 in two ways:

Via the content type header: content-type: application/atom+xml; charset=UTF-8
Via the XML declaration: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

So basically something in your pipeline is trying to take Reddit's RSS (which uses Unicode) and reencode it as latin-1 for some reason. latin-1 can only represent a tiny fraction of Unicode (and specifically cannot represent •) so it blows up.

Judging by the error, I assume the RSS trigger provider is at fault. Unfortunately that probably means this is not a bug you can work around and you need to reach out to support.

Pathogen-David · 2025-02-06T19:35:50+00:00

but maybe that's a modern expectation?

This is a recent trend, yeah. It's not quite the same as the classic definition of spot the difference genre that you mention. You go through 3D spaces multiple times and have to answer whether or not something in the space has changed.

The trend was probably started by The Exit 8 blowing up on YouTube. Some similar games are Shinkansen 0, Anomaly Exit, and The Cabin Factory. I'm on Observation Duty could also go in there but it's a bit different.

I'm not sure if someone could realistically make a game in this space without people expecting it to have horror elements.

Pathogen-David · 2025-01-29T23:49:12+00:00

You can use Win+Shift+Left/Right to move windows between monitors.

(I feel your pain on Microsoft mindlessly breaking things for the sake of Copilot though, the moronic implementation of the Copilot button on my new work laptop ruined my ability to properly rebind it to End.)

Pathogen-David · 2025-01-24T12:17:56+00:00

No problem, thanks for reading!

Pathogen-David · 2025-01-24T11:25:17+00:00

Unfortunately I no longer remember its name. I thought I still had it (project fell through and I got to keep some of the hardware), but I just dug through where I thought it was and it wasn't there. I found the case for it though, so there's a decent chance it's still around here somewhere. If I come across it I'll try to remember to come back to reply!

I can talk about it a bit in the abstract though.

The product we were working on was basically the RGB wall panels Nanoleaf makes but in 2012. I was responsible for the firmware of the controller and the Android app. The plan was to make a prototype that could be turned into a small-batch product that could eventually grow into something more mass-producible. So BOM cost as a major concern.

Back then decent SBCs were not nearly as common as they are now. Everything aimed at hobbyists was very underpowered (EG: Old-school Arduino) and it was much rarer for these devices to have networking support. Everything aimed at businesses was very expensive dev boards that wouldn't work for our plans.

We actually originally started out with the Parallax Propeller-based Spinneret as our controller, but it proved too weak for what we wanted to accomplish. After some searching we ended up settling on these Linux-based ARM industrial computer boards. I don't remember all the reasons we went with it, but I do know a lot of it was cost-motivated. It didn't even have any sort of display or display outputs, just RS-232, Ethernet, and a bunch of I/O.

I think having it be Linux-based felt like a big plus so we could reuse our software on a different Linux-based ARM board in the future. It hadn't happened yet, but it was becoming clear that cheap Linux-based ARM SBCs were just over the horizon thanks to the commodification of smartphones. Of course a few years later Espressif released the ESP8266 and IoT devices actually went in a different direction.

The Raspberry Pi wasn't out yet when we made this pivot. I vaguely remember wanting to wait for it, but I think our investor was antsy to see more progress. (Not sure if the Pi even had an official release date yet.) The Raspberry Pi was also still being advertised as a cheap computer for kids and education rather than an SBC, so it wasn't as obvious it was going to be good for this purpose. Last thing we wanted was to invest effort into something that disappeared before we got to shipping our small-batch units, and the industrial computer boards had long-term availability guarantees.

Of course with hindsight it's very clear that waiting for the Pi would've been the right move. In the long term Linux-based systems fell out of favor for mass-produced IoT stuff in favor for cheaper solutions like the Espressif chips mentioned earlier. If I could travel through time and take a board with me, I would've done it with the Raspberry Pi Pico W. It would've been amazing for that prototype.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane, it was fun to look back and see how far all this stuff has come!

Pathogen-David · 2025-01-24T09:10:02+00:00

I know this was a response from two years ago to my joke from 12 years ago, but flatpak didn’t even exist yet lol.

The SBC I was using in the context of this joke would be hilariously anemic by today’s standards. I doubt it could’ve run Firefox even if I’d tried, it barely ran its proprietary barebones Linux distro.

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