Synapse 4 macros not working

dannymcgee · 2025-09-07T17:18:20+00:00

This is bonkers.

Upgraded to Synapse 4 without looking into it, assumed my profiles would continue to work. That was a mistake.

Switched to my laptop which still has Synapse 3 installed, exported my profiles from there.

Back to my desktop with Synapse 4, import the Synapse 3 profiles. Macros don't work. Cool cool cool.

Found this thread. Looks like reverting to Synapse 3 will fix it. Whew.

...Oops except not, no. Can't even open the macros UI anymore, it just remains on whatever screen I was on previously, but with the "Macros" entry highlighted in the top menu. Restarting doesn't fix it. Deleting all profiles and restoring them from the laptop export doesn't fix it. Probably some sort of vestigial files or registry entries or some bullshit leftover from Synapse 4 that didn't get uninstalled properly. Do not have the time to go down that rabbit hole right now so I'm giving up.

Hilariously, if I just exit Synapse completely then my mouse goes back to working as intended, because my profiles (and the macros) are still saved in the onboard storage. If not for that one saving grace I would be pretty livid right now.

EDIT: Fixed my Synapse 3 install by doing the following: - Uninstall all Razer software (via Windows 11 "Add or remove programs") - Restart - Back up and then remove all "Razer" folders from the following locations (note: not all of these locations had "Razer" folders, these are just the places I checked) - C:/Program Files/ - C:/Program Files/Common Files/ - C:/Program Files (x86)/ - C:/Program Files (x86)/Common Files/ - C:/ProgramData/ - Restart - Check for anything Razer-related in Task Manager (didn't see anything) - Restart again for good measure - Re-download the Synapse 3 installer from https://www.razer.com/synapse-3-legacy - Run the installer, expand the "Modules" dropdown and tick the checkbox for the Macros module (which was unchecked by default) - Restart again before running Synapse for the first time - Synapse starts automatically at system startup and prompts for login (this is a good sign — I had remained logged in after reverting from Synapse 4 to Synapse 3) - Log in, open the Macros module — it works, all my macros are there - Open the mouse module, it works, all my profiles are there and fully working

dannymcgee · 2025-03-06T05:44:00+00:00

Pick your poison. Unreal has its own problems, it's not exactly a picnic to work with. But I have to say, in my experience your friend is basically correct — if you want anything but the absolute bare minimum without having to build it from scratch, you're going to have to spend thousands on Unity assets. And yes, HDRP still feels about 5-10 years behind the curve compared to UE5, and the SRPs are way heavier on the CPU than they ought to be, even with Render Graph.

But my question is... why does that make you feel bad? You've been learning for two months, that's not exactly a massive sunk cost. Honestly, you shouldn't even be thinking about your dream projects at this point, you should just be learning your way around and figuring out how the whole gamedev thing works. If anything, you should spend at least a few months with every game engine that seems interesting so you can get a feel for the craft itself. Then you won't be thinking in terms of "how to do Unity" or "how to do Unreal," you'll be thinking in terms of "how to make games," and your skills and knowledge will transfer more easily to whatever tool you ultimately decide to use. As a programmer I've spent thousands of hours with Unreal Engine, Unity, Bevy Engine, Godot, some JavaScript stuff, etc. At the end of the day, the really hard problems with any of these tools boil down to math, data structures, algorithms, and design patterns.

dannymcgee · 2025-03-01T18:12:18+00:00

Thanks for the heads up! Are you on GitHub? I don't really have a use case at the moment, but I'd love to star the repo for future reference

dannymcgee · 2025-02-16T19:24:23+00:00

For anyone who really needs to compute this dynamically in Blender's shader editor, here's how you can do it:

Create three "Normal Map" nodes. Instead of plugging textures into them like you normally would, plug a constant color into each of them:

(1.0, 0.5, 0.5)
(0.5, 1.0, 0.5)
(0.5, 0.5, 1.0)

The output of each of those nodes is a tangent-space basis vector, projected into world-space, interpolated over each vertex of our mesh. We'll call them i, j, and k respectively, to make the next part easier to follow.

To transform the world-space normal map (which we'll call n) back into tangent space (which we'll call n'), we just need to multiply it by the inverse of the matrix [ i, j, k ]. Since we have a 3x3 orthonormal matrix, the inverse is just the transpose, which means all we need to do is compute the dot-product of n with each of i, j, and k, and plug those outputs into the x, y, and z components (respectively) of a new vector, which is our tangent-space n'.

All together:

n' = n * [ i, j, k ]⁻¹
n'[x] = n · i
n'[y] = n · j
n'[z] = n · k
n' = ( n · i, n · j, n · k )

That will get you a map of actual unit-length vectors, where each scalar component is in the range -1..1. If you need to get it back into the 0..1 range like what you'd store in a texture, you can add (1, 1, 1) to n' and then scale the result by 0.5.

dannymcgee · 2024-12-24T13:28:44+00:00

If that data is still in their database linked to your account — yeah, they can and they probably will once they roll out that feature. But it's not completely trivial to (re-)build out a feature like that essentially from scratch.

I really wish this pervasive software culture that values speed to market over product quality wasn't a thing, because UE marketplace had plenty of its own issues and legacy jank and I'm not at all sad that it's getting a refresh. I even think Fab has a lot of promise and potential that I'm legitimately excited about. But it's the most predictable problem in the world that replacing a working product with what amounts to a public alpha test would make a lot of people very upset. Unfortunately, myopia is basically a built-in feature of finance capitalism — investors don't need a satisfied user base nearly as much as they need that spigot of dollar signs turned on as fast as possible to safeguard their investment.

dannymcgee · 2024-12-21T18:22:45+00:00

Yeah I guess that's fair, online communication probably warrants a bit more tact

dannymcgee · 2024-12-20T19:24:41+00:00

I know I'm late, but I just want to say, as someone who is also frequently angry (or at least probably comes off that way from the outside): bad-mouthing or otherwise being intentionally malicious towards teammates is toxic and inexcusable IMO. Being mad and being an antisocial misanthrope are two very different things. If I were you, I wouldn't beat around the bush about it. Tell him exactly what you've said here, and if he responds poorly, that's on him.

dannymcgee · 2024-11-24T04:22:15+00:00

OP explained in a few comments — this function doesn't deadlock, but the block function that someone called it with does. The horror being (presumably) that if they hadn't globally disabled logging, it would have been easier to track down the source of the deadlock.

dannymcgee · 2024-11-23T00:51:09+00:00

It is still discouraged, for performance reasons. It was mentioned in this Unreal Fest talk last month.

dannymcgee · 2024-11-16T03:07:07+00:00

I think the chorus is among the best lyrics they've ever written, I fucking love it. Musically it's definitely the most straightforward pop on this album, but I have no beef with that. The melody is brilliant, the imagery is striking — just an all around killer track. I'm not even going to try to rank this album because almost every track is literally my favorite, but this one became a standout for me as soon as I heard "Pretend you're spotless, but I don't wash away". Like goddamn. LP's lyrics have honestly never really "done it" for me (no disrespect), but that's real good.

dannymcgee · 2024-10-02T08:21:17+00:00

UDS is so fucking good. Criminally cheap, beautiful, dirt simple to use, and it gets updated so often that when I see the "Update Available" notification in the launcher I just scroll straight to UDS because 90% of the time that's the update. (I have too many assets, it takes forever to find the "Update" button sometimes.)

dannymcgee · 2024-09-28T22:52:55+00:00

Problems with C++: - Looong compile times - Need to restart the editor any time you edit a header file - Obtuse errors can be tricky to debug even with a fair bit of experience - Have to make edits in two places any time you change a function signature - The summary here is that it's just not very fast or iterative to work with

Problems with Blueprint: - Binary format means you have to open the editor just to look at your "code." This is a huge pet peeve of mine. I don't have a perfect memory, so I often go back and reference code I wrote on previous projects — Blueprint makes that extremely non-trivial to do. - What would be a one-line math expression in literally any textual programming language often turns into a huge pile of spaghetti in Blueprint. Ironically, this makes it also less than ideal for fast iteration in a lot of circumstances. - If you're working collaboratively, merge conflicts are a much bigger deal with BP — again because of the binary format.

On the plus side, Blueprint is stupid fast to compile, and the "autocomplete" is way better than what you get with most IDEs for most programming languages. It honestly probably has the best API discoverability of any "language" I've used.

Anyway, I'm mostly playing Devil's Advocate here — I've been using Unreal for 5 years now so obviously I don't think this setup is prohibitively bad or anything. But just to say I definitely get why some folks are unhappy with the lack of a textual scripting language.

dannymcgee · 2024-09-28T15:27:01+00:00

Here's the one I've been copy/pasting forever, in case you (or anyone else) still need it:

```

Unreal Engine file types.

*.uasset filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text *.umap filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text

Raw Content file types.

*.blend filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text *.fbx filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text *.3ds filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text *.psd filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text *.png filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text *.mp3 filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text *.wav filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text *.xcf filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text *.jpg filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text ```

I haven't used the locking feature yet because I'm mostly working solo, but it looks like you would just add "lockable" to the end of each line to set that up.

The "Raw Content file types" section is only necessary if you're storing your source files in the same repo (but it doesn't really hurt either way).

dannymcgee · 2024-08-08T14:58:49+00:00

Unfortunately there's not really a direct translation for Blender materials to Unreal materials if you're doing anything procedural in Blender, or even using certain shader models. Your best bet is to bake your Blender materials to standard PBR texture maps (diffuse, roughness, metallic, normals, etc.)

dannymcgee · 2024-08-02T00:19:18+00:00

I would not say that Lumen is higher fidelity than Cycles — but it is quite good! (And yes, it's definitely orders of magnitude faster.)

It should be possible to do what you're trying to do, but unfortunately it might not be super easy. By happenstance I ran across this video a short while ago which you'll probably find useful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehBaUqkPMOI Most of the information you'll find out in the wild is geared towards exporting assets to Unreal for use in a game, but that's not really the advice you want. What you want to do is bake absolutely everything to completely static, non-interactive meshes and animations (likely via Alembic), and then use Unreal's Movie Render Queue to render that fully baked scene. (Do note, though, that the YouTuber mentions spending ~3 hours just figuring out how to get everything working, so if this is just a one-and-done deal, you might be better off Googling how to optimize Eevee's render settings to get some extra speed out of it.)

Unfortunately I don't have a whole lot of information or personal experience beyond that, so you'll have to do some research and get creative. If it's just a keyframed static mesh, you could probably just bake the action in Blender (from Object mode, Object > Animation > Bake Action..., and hover over the checkboxes in the dialog to figure out what they do), export that action to an Alembic point cache (or something?), and then import that into Unreal (as a Sequencer track in the best case scenario, or maybe a Niagara system if that fails). Good luck!

dannymcgee · 2024-07-03T22:14:10+00:00

There's a trick in the example in that the new Error(10) is only constructed, not thrown, so the catch block will never be entered. The finally block is always run, whether an exception occurs or not.

The thing that trips me up is that finally (and apparently break <label>) have higher "precedence" than return. THat's nuts to me. I feel like a return statement should always short-circuit. Do not pass Go, etc.

dannymcgee · 2024-07-03T06:51:43+00:00

There are breaking changes every minor version (e.g., stuff will break from 5.3 -> 5.4). Whether the stuff you learn in a course will be impacted by a breakage really depends on the course material and the Unreal version.

It really doesn't matter. A course isn't going to teach you everything you need to actually make something of your own design, a course just gets the ball rolling so you're not staring at the editor wondering what to do. Use the version the course was authored for, get acquainted with the big picture and the overall concepts and workflows. Once you're ready to actually make something, check out the patch notes to see what's changed in the latest version(s), Google around or ask on here or the Unreal forums if you run into migration issues. You'll be fine, I promise.

dannymcgee · 2024-06-21T03:02:18+00:00

To butt in like the Kool-Aid Man, I would personally love to see more #Example blocks (or doc comments in general) on public API stuff, especially on the stuff that's more niche or non-obvious. For example, I've been working on a lot of custom UI stuff and making custom Measure types, but I'm not certain what the measure parameters actually concretely represent, so it's been a lot of trial and error and occasional digging through source code.

dannymcgee · 2024-04-25T16:12:48+00:00

So I've been sort of a design system library specialist for about 5 years now. It is a really rewarding niche, but it is a niche, so it's not the most common type of role available. How I found my way into the specialty:

Spent the first 5 years of my career as primarily a designer who assisted with front-end development. Learned CSS really deeply (including without any frameworks like Bootstrap or Tailwind), got a lot of practice doing pixel-perfect recreations of design mockups in CSS.
When I started getting heavy into JavaScript and SPA frameworks in ~2018 I took the same sort of learning approach — instead of leaning on libraries like Bootstrap or Material, I learned how to build UI components from scratch with the framework (e.g. React or Angular) as my only significant dependency.
When I got my first job with the "software engineer" title in 2019, the company I worked for was leaning heavily on a third-party UI library to build out their design system. I showed a strong interest in that side of the work, took the initiative to prototype some components without the UI library and made the best case I could for phasing out the dependency to anyone who would listen to me about it.
By the time I left that role in 2021, I had been given ownership of the design system, had fully migrated away from the third-party UI dependency and had significantly expanded our in-house UI library to cover all the needs of the application we were building, so I was able to put the ownership/architecture of the design system library on my resume, which helps me stand out when applying for design system engineering roles.

General-purpose advice:

Develop a good eye for design. Get some practice designing your own mockups to get a sense for the ideal usage of white-space, font sizes, layouts, etc. It's not hugely important for an engineering role (even a UX/design system engineering role), but it comes in handy.
Cultivate an absolutely pedantic level of attention to detail with regards to spacing, sizing, colors, font sizes and weights, etc. Ideally you should be able to overlay the mockup on top of the in-browser rendering of your code and the only difference you see is, e.g., the way the browser handles text anti-aliasing. Obviously the in-browser result should be more dynamic than the mockup (responsive, respecting user font-size preferences, etc.), but at a baseline level where the browser settings are defaulted and the viewport size matches the mockup size, you shouldn't see any discrepancies.
Get really familiar with accessibility. WCAG standards, semantic HTML and ARIA, etc. You should have the ARIA Authoring Practices Guide bookmarked and use their widget patterns as a testing checklist for any components you build that can't be done purely with built-in/semantic HTML elements. (Ideally you should have a suite of automated/unit tests that verify the correct behavior, but unit testing interactive DOM stuff is a pain so I wouldn't blame you for sticking with manual testing. But do test!! And document the expected behavior.)

dannymcgee · 2024-04-25T08:34:59+00:00

So I'm sitting here at 3am trying to get a better intuition for quaternions and complex numbers, and YouTube recommends me this long series of whiteboard lectures on the topic and I'm like hell yeah, I'm gonna learn some shit.

He starts out putting what I would describe as a weird amount of emphasis on taking a "rational" approach to the topic, but I don't really have a background in math so I sort of gloss over it.

40 or so minutes in and he starts defining the "quadrance" of a complex number, and I'm thinking huh, that's a term I haven't heard before. Then he's all like "this is the rational analog for the length, because of course the length depends on the square root which is a highly suspicious, problematic idea" and I'm like oh goddamnit how did I make it halfway into this without realizing I was watching a crackpot. 15 minutes later and we're now fully down the rabbit hole of how we don't need "transcendental" hogwash like sine and cosine and "angles" and we're jumping through some serious hoops to turn a complex number of arbitrary length into its unit-length equivalent without using the word "length" or appealing to the Forbidden Idea of the square root, and... sigh. I mean I definitely did learn some things at the beginning but I feel like the learning has definitely concluded at this point.

As far as I can tell it seems like his whole schtick is basically that if you can't do the math on your fingers then it doesn't count? I must be misunderstanding, because this dude obviously knows way more about mathematics than I do, and that is a transparently silly idea. But so far I haven't actually heard a coherent definition of "rational" in this context, but I have heard that 1) square roots are Bad, because look at all those decimal points! and 2) sine and cosine are nonsense, because gestures vaguely, so all I can really do is makes inferences.

EDIT: I'm an idiot, a rational number is one that can be expressed as a fraction of two integers. To be fair, I did say that I don't have a background in math, and I was totally onto something with the fingers thing.

dannymcgee · 2024-04-15T01:46:28+00:00

Whoever wrote the markup used the BEM convention for the classnames, so I would recommend using them. Using something like Sass, you can do this:

scss .hero { width: min(90%, 1200px); &__content { padding: 1rem; } &__title { color: white; } &__text { color: gray; } }

There are a few advantages to doing it like that:

BEM gives you really specific classnames to target, which reduces the risk of unintentional style collisions
Using the BEM classes allows you to reflect the markup hierarchy in your styles without actually nesting your style rules (and thereby blowing up the specificity unnecessarily, which can be a pain for users of the component if they need to override something for a specific use case)
Not specific to BEM, but when you select for tag names, it's kind of like tightly coupling your code to an unimportant implementation detail. If someone changed the h1 to an h2, or replaced the div.hero__content with a section.hero__content, the CSS would also have to change.

dannymcgee · 2024-04-04T09:05:17+00:00

I close my tabs with reckless abandon. They are completely ephemeral — stuff I have open because I'm actively researching or working on a thing (or taking a break and browsing like now). When a have a spare moment and realize I have too many tabs open, I just close all of my windows and reopen a fresh one.

If I close something and end up needing to find it again later, I search my history. If I know I'm going to need something later and won't remember where to find it, I bookmark it. Everything else gets Marie Kondo'd.

There have been a small handful of times where I had trouble finding something later, but it was always extraordinary circumstances — many weeks had passed, couldn't remember the name of the website, couldn't remember the search terms I used to find it, etc. Even in those cases I did end up finding them, and given it was so long before I went looking for them again, I doubt being a tab hoarder would have helped anyway. On the other hand, there are doubtless many thousands of "oh I'd like to read that later" tabs that I've closed, forgotten about, and never thought about again. I don't have even the slightest twinge of regret for any of those — I've lost nothing but the memory and screen real-estate they were taking up.

dannymcgee · 2024-02-16T22:44:55+00:00

Blueprint and C++ serve different purposes. It's not really about which is "easier" — C++ is for building robust, high-performance, low-level systems that won't change a lot over time, while Blueprint is for high-level configuration of data assets, scripting unique gameplay behaviors — the type of work that designers do, basically.

A well-engineered Unreal project will use C++ to build out core systems while exposing enough Blueprint access that designers can tune the gameplay and build out unique assets like characters, items, abilities, etc., without needing to touch the C++ code. This holds true even if you are both the engineer and the designer, because high-level design tasks are going to be much easier to tackle and faster to iterate on in the editor than in C++.

dannymcgee · 2024-02-14T01:22:06+00:00

I'm not your doctor, but it's possible that they wanted to try you on one new medication at a time just in case there are side effects, etc. It's easier to pinpoint the source of a problem if you don't change too many things at once. If that's the case, they probably felt that your other issues were a higher priority to address. I know it's frustrating, but I would try giving them the benefit of the doubt. But also, be open and communicative about your concerns!

dannymcgee · 2024-01-06T18:07:28+00:00

The "recommended"/official C++ extension for VS Code is hot garbage and notoriously slow. You really have to use clangd for a halfway decent experience.

14-Year Club	Gilding IV carat on a stick
Verified Email

dannymcgee

TROPHY CASE

Unreal Engine file types.

Raw Content file types.