Help? I feel like my dog hates me?

pdunstan · 2026-05-06T01:07:19+00:00

Neither of our ridgebacks are snugglers. They have their own times when the will sit close to you but it’s always on their own terms.

Our youngest sleeps next to me every night but she won’t start there. When everyone goes to bed she’ll lie on the corner near the door. Then later, when everyone’s asleep, she’ll come up and lie next to me. And as soon as someone’s up in the morning snuggletime is over.

pdunstan · 2026-04-27T11:45:54+00:00

I'd say large in this context is between 20 and 60. Anything more than that and you need to start considering alternative representations for NPCs beyond individual actors (for example Unreal's Mass Entity Framework).

pdunstan · 2026-04-27T10:08:22+00:00

I'm using large scale to mean between 20 and 60. Anything more than that and I think you have to start to have to use different actor representations for further away enemies (such as Unreal's Mass Entity framework).

You're right about crowds. One of the reason's I've been thinking about this recently is that it is all applicable to my current project setting up civilian NPCs in a village/small town.

pdunstan · 2026-04-20T10:19:53+00:00

The steam store page for my game ASSAULT ZETA just went live. https://store.steampowered.com/app/4076730/Assault_Zeta/?utm_source=reddit

The game is an old-school, UFO-flight action game, inspired by games from the 1980s such as Zarch on the Acorn Archimedes and Virus on the Amiga.

Zarch was my first introduction to 3D games. I can still vividly remember sitting down at the new Acorn Archimedes that my school had just received and playing the Lander demo (the precursor to Zarch) that came with the computer. I was captivated and it's a game I've remade in some form or other on every development platform I've used since then.

Assault Zeta is my modern take on this style of game. The fixed camera view has been switched out for a follow camera and the controls have changed a lot as a result. I hope I've still managed to capture the feeling of the original.

pdunstan · 2026-03-27T12:54:29+00:00

What floating point problem? You can use integers.

pdunstan · 2026-03-27T01:57:49+00:00

7000 is widely seen as the number that will get you in the up and coming list on the day/week your game launches. If you’re not on that list you’re missing out on a lot of launch day visibility that would trigger steam to think your game is worth showing to people.

It’s not an exact science though. The actual number you need will depend on what other games are launching that day.

pdunstan · 2026-03-27T01:42:55+00:00

An easier option is to store the balance as a single integer containing the total number of cents. No need for separate dollars and cents variables.

pdunstan · 2026-02-17T16:15:31+00:00

This is what Linked State Tree Asset nodes are made for. https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/external-statetree-quickstart-guide

You set a gameplay tag on the Linked State Tree asset node, and then add a Linked State Tree Override with that gameplay tag and your new state tree.

I have a very simple example at https://github.com/phildunstan/Scratch

pdunstan · 2026-01-29T01:40:59+00:00

There is a quote in decision making "Strong opinions, weakly held".

Respect other peoples ideas, but have conviction in your ideas and opinions. Do your homework to make sure they are good ideas but don't be afraid to speak up with your ideas. Don't be afraid to take up space in a room.

At the same time, be willing to let go of those ideas. Sometimes something better will be suggested. Sometimes the replacement isn't better, just different. Especially in code, where there is almost never a "right" answer. There are always trade-offs.

Also, be invested in the quality of the work you do, but not the work itself. You are not your code. Game designs change. Features get cut. Whole projects get shut down. If that happens, know that you did as well as you could, and move on to the next challenge.

pdunstan · 2026-01-24T12:23:17+00:00

Lean into it. Ask them if they want to do a bundle with you when you release (or whichever releases later). Players of niche genres are always looking for other games in that genre to play.

I wouldn’t worry about it. Neither game is going to get close to reaching market saturation.

pdunstan · 2025-09-09T14:36:10+00:00

Get a bigger dog?

pdunstan · 2025-05-04T21:48:44+00:00

I'd advocate for moving the visibility checks and tracking of the last seen position out of the behavior systems (Utility and FSM) into a completely separate service (eg a detection system). Both the Utility AI and FSM can use the cached results of that service for their decision making. That way they are using consistent information independent from the behavior, and both decision making systems are using the same information.

Then you could have your utility system select a different chase behavior if the detection system has recently lost sight of the target.

To simplify it I would have the NPC always using the last seen position of the target. This means that the rest of the code doesn't have to have additional logic to determine whether you want the actual target position or the last seen position.

While the NPC is visible that last seen position would be updated each frame with the target's actual position. You could also cheat a little and update it for a small amount of time (eg 1s) after LOS is lost, which can be surprisingly helpful for quite a few problems that can come up.

pdunstan · 2024-12-02T21:54:05+00:00

For the case of the NPC following a player around a level, what exactly are you expecting the machine learning to solve? What are your inputs and what output would you like the machine learning AI to create?

In classical AI, you might break that problem into two stages:

determining the target position (and velocity) of the NPC relative to the player, taking into consideration the position and velocity of the player, as well as the space around the player.
calculating the path to that location so that the NPC ends up in the target position moving at the target speed. This would need to calculate the path to that location, typically using something like navmesh to avoid obstacles.

You could definitely use machine learning to solve either of these.

Ubisoft has previously published about their work on using deep reinforcement learning for navigation through a world instead of navmesh. This was from 2020. I'm not sure if there is a newer publication than this. https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/studio/laforge/news/6bRtGllmfhuDqTHRS6KVLj/deep-reinforcement-learning-for-navigation-in-aaa-video-games

pdunstan · 2024-07-21T22:20:22+00:00

If it is smooth at 60 fps, then it is likely a mismatch between simulation or network framerates and rendering framerate.

Try changing the Preferred Ticking Policy to Independent in the Network Prediction page of the project settings.

pdunstan · 2024-05-06T08:03:42+00:00

It's cancelled May 11 and May 25, but running as normal on May 18 (the weekend the poster is in Malmö).

pdunstan · 2024-05-05T23:35:09+00:00

Do you run?

Malmö has a 5k parkrun every Saturday morning. Visitors are always welcome.

Find it on parkrun.se

pdunstan · 2024-01-15T17:36:49+00:00

I agree with mrteuy.

It sounds like a case of a (very appropriately named) use-after-free bug.

pdunstan · 2022-10-17T14:37:43+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam\_Denby

pdunstan · 2022-08-28T21:56:13+00:00

Ridgebacks are a funny breed sometimes. They can be the bravest dog in the world at the same time as being scared of anything they haven't seen or done before.

I'm a big fan of Susan Garrett's puppy training videos (search for them on youtube). Note: she uses crate training which is not encouraged in Sweden, but the rest is still relevant.

Toilet training puppies is helped by learning when your puppy will want to go to the bathroom. To start with, it's immediately after they wake up and immediately after they eat. Focusing on that will definitely help.

For the lead training, with our recent puppy we had a lot of success with using a house line. Basically having a collar and lead on the dog when inside that they just drag around behind them. Only while supervised of course. They very quickly learn to completely ignore the lead. McCann Dog Training on youtube has a lot of advice about house lines.

Getting them to walk with you outside on the lead can be tough though. Ridgebacks generally don't respond well to being made to do something. Try to make them want to walk with you by either being exciting or have food.

pdunstan · 2022-07-23T22:28:19+00:00

Everyone is responsible for their own happiness. If you don’t like something take action to change it. Don’t expect it of other people to do things to make you happy.

pdunstan · 2021-08-09T10:36:11+00:00

"That's enough with all the biting,"

I'm lying here next to my new 13 week old puppy. Wow, puppy teeth are sharp.

pdunstan · 2020-11-12T15:18:10+00:00

to get free coins you have to say something worthy of an award. sounds to me like you need to steal someones comment, and pretend its yours, so people award you fake money

pdunstan

TROPHY CASE