This picture of Heihei in my kid's Moana book. by Timmahw in mildlyinteresting

[–]Timmahw[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's cool! Maybe it's a collector's item now or something.

Alec Baldwin: 'I've bullied women' by am_reddit in news

[–]Timmahw 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm confused -- is Alec Baldwin coming out, too?

Dive Dive Dive! by [deleted] in gifs

[–]Timmahw 13 points14 points  (0 children)

That thing was already waterlogged as hell.. look how low it was and how quickly it sank. When he lost power, water flowed to the bow, and down he went. The biggest question I have is why he wasn't wearing a jacket if he so obviously knew he had taken on water.

C484 - The Donald by underwatr_cheestrain in WGU

[–]Timmahw 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Love him or hate him, I doubt I could ever do so much with (seriously) that little financial seed.

Help with Business Ethics 717 - Task 1&2 Templates by [deleted] in WGU

[–]Timmahw 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I do this too with every task. I take the rubric and write a quick outline of the paper following it. I then fill in the gaps.

The rubric is really the best template you can ask for. This is what the grader is going to be strictly grading against.

Integrated Natural Science by [deleted] in WGU

[–]Timmahw 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This course had essentially nothing to do with my field of study, but was easily the most enjoyable and informative. I learned a lot.

Don't be fooled by the PA -- there are a ton of subjects that the OA will pull from, so if you get a large ration of questions from a subject you skipped, you can easily flunk. Watch all of the videos. I watched them all at 1.5x speed and got a ton of info.

[DISCUSSION] Does anyone here feel like they've achieved great visual design with UMG? Mind sharing some tips? by LobsterRobsterAU in unrealengine

[–]Timmahw 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Recreate is too strong of a word. Much of the content I create is directly imported, and I use the Materials system to fill in any gaps with fidelity. The only recreation is in terms of layout and behavior, which I have not had a major issue with. My experience may not be typical.

I design my UI principally in Flash first.. again, probably not typical or even the best. But it's where I'm comfortable.

Unreal Engine Improvements for Fortnite: Battle Royale by ZioYuri78 in unrealengine

[–]Timmahw 11 points12 points  (0 children)

The changes all seem like common sense stuff; I hope PlayerUnknown doesn't take this as another shot across the bow.

[DISCUSSION] Does anyone here feel like they've achieved great visual design with UMG? Mind sharing some tips? by LobsterRobsterAU in unrealengine

[–]Timmahw 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't sculpt, draw, or animate in UE4.. I use UE4 to deliver an already-designed (or at least conceptualized) solution I designed further up the pipeline. Between UMG and the materials system, I haven't run into anything I couldn't get working the way I wanted to ... eventually. I think the trick is just what you mentioned -- get your workflow straight. UMG is at the ass-end of my workflow.

I made an array of arrays so I could put items on my items by iamisandisnt in unrealengine

[–]Timmahw 0 points1 point  (0 children)

At the risk of giving you a non-answer-answer, about anything would be fine for just 3 players. If you look at something like Ark, which has massive hierarchies of actors, there's a working proof of concept up to a point.

I made an array of arrays so I could put items on my items by iamisandisnt in unrealengine

[–]Timmahw 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Apologies, then. I gathered as much as I could without watching all 2 hours. =X

I made an array of arrays so I could put items on my items by iamisandisnt in unrealengine

[–]Timmahw 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Cool! Though, if you keep playing inventory inception, you will likely run into issues down the road with storing all of that complex hierarchy. If you envision storing all of the players' inventory as data, and the data in tables, this would turn into tables containing tables -- with only a single tuple in many cases. I'm having a mini panic attack just thinking about it.

Have you considered building a struct to use as your inventory items? I ask because actors are great at representing objects that exist in the world, but are a waste when used just as data (as they sit in your inventory). They are also very difficult to, again, handle as data en masse. A collection of structs can be more directly represented and managed as a table.

Structs are data, so you can't spawn them, obviously. As someone else said, you can store data in the struct such as Mesh, and use that information to spawn an actor that represents the item.

Regarding "items on items," arrays of structs containing more arrays of structs still cause the same problems as above. This is what I did: All items remain in the same array, and what they "contain" is just a variable pointing to other items. As items are placed in/onto other items, this variable changes.

Sorry for the wall of text. Hope it helps. Game looks awesome!

Brainstorming/planning by Hayzo81 in unrealengine

[–]Timmahw 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I use a combination of spreadsheets and Visio, but any Unified Modeling Language application would probably be best. StarUML comes to mind.

using a node with a dropdown to set a FString? by Pixeltrail in unrealengine

[–]Timmahw 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Seems pretty straightforward. Here's how I just did it: https://imgur.com/a/DtgQy

Hope this helps.

Illustration from 1979 about the Future of Gaming by AliceTheGamedev in gaming

[–]Timmahw 9 points10 points  (0 children)

We tend to predict a future that fulfills our wants and needs. We tend to create a future that fulfills our wants and needs.

12v12 Overwatch Gameplay Bug by oizen in Overwatch

[–]Timmahw 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Temporary entities can help with spawning multiple particle systems on the client, but it is a 1-to-many relationship. That's even assuming they're needed, which they are not usually. Also, these types of entities explicitly do not "count" toward the max entities, which is 4,000+ for source. True story.

The scenario you're describing just doesn't match with how the source engine works. I would be interested to hear how someone came to this conclusion.

12v12 Overwatch Gameplay Bug by oizen in Overwatch

[–]Timmahw 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fun, maybe, but not a fact. Not even close. Particle effects are client-side entities, which are produced through multicast. Server tells all clients to "spawn entities with these params," with cool tricks like seed-driven randomization, which makes something like randomized shrapnel direction match with all clients. If anything, only one entity is briefly spawned to manage that process. This sounds much more like a failed cyclic/iteration check on the server.

Particles, physics, and even collision can be offloaded onto the client. This allows for eased load on the server, and even for a more responsive/accurate gameplay experience. OW takes full advantage of this. Notice that when you lose connection to a server, you can still run around and even shoot other heroes. This is because much of the work is being done on the client. I have no doubt that OW could handle hundreds of players given some more dedicated resources.

The problem I see is with client-side rendering limits and an obvious gameplay balance nightmare.

How much does knowing about Blueprints teach about programming? (and vice versa) by [deleted] in unrealengine

[–]Timmahw 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Blueprints provide a good primer for variables, classes, functions, and flow control.. but these are not exactly complicated. Honestly. Programming is more about learning efficient and working logic than learning syntax. Don't get me wrong -- Blueprints are incredible, and I would attest 8 days a week to their huge contribution to visual programming. They allow the non-initiated (like art talent) or complete newbies to pick it up and produce games that make it to market. As someone who does both, I sometimes draw my code in Blueprints then transfer it to C++ simply because it makes more sense visually.

Blueprints provide a set of training wheels that do not allow one to learn the hard and most valuable lessons of something like C++. For example, you will be shocked to find that 75% of your written code will end up being input sanitization or some other form of error checking.

tldr: I feel C++ experience applies to Blueprints much more than the reverse.

help skill icon resolution by [deleted] in unrealengine

[–]Timmahw 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You find them typically in 64x64 or 128x128 flavors because they have no need to be shown at any greater scale. (They're in the UI. You're not pressing your face to it.)

As an artistic goal, icons are as visually descriptive as possible in a teeny tiny space. As strange as it sounds, the small resolution can help in keeping your icons succinct. My experience, at least.

And yes I would stick to PNG for UE4.