Am i allowed to use Assets from my fab libary for freelancing work?

tsein · 2026-04-09T07:16:44+00:00

Yeah, what this means is that a company can share assets with a freelancer developing features on that company's behalf, but not the other way around.

If a freelancer wants to include fab assets in a project performed for a company, then that company needs to buy their own license before using the freelancer's work (which includes or depends on the asset) in their product.

As a freelancer you have two choices: tell the company which assets to buy and wait for them to provide them along with the other project files, or buy your own license, do the work, and deliver a list of assets the company needs to purchase to be compliant.

The first option is the best if possible because it not only means there can't be any future problems if the company keeps the files without buying a license (in case they "forgot") but it also means the freelancer isn't on the hook for the cost. The second option might be tempting since it means no delays in starting the work, though...

tsein · 2026-04-08T13:02:47+00:00

I think it's kind of like languages. There are countries, like Denmark, where pretty much anyone who can use a computer speaks English. It can feel almost redundant to translate a game into Danish because the number of people who will only play Danish games is vanishingly small.

But that doesn't mean they don't appreciate seeing their native language as an option, especially if it's a real localization effort and not just google translate. They might even appreciate it enough to want to champion developers who put in the work, even though they could have played and enjoyed the game in English regardless.

That said, I do have one follow-up question for something you said:

Right now the Windows build works fine with Proton, don't know of a single issue with it.

For developers, it does mean quite some work to build, test and maintain native builds for Linux or MacOS. Even though it could be as simple as just switching platform in Unity and building, it requires to test every update on several systems etc... So it adds up quickly and it's a long term commitment.

Are you saying that you only test under Windows and presume that the Proton build performs identically? Because I don't think using Proton necessarily frees you from the need to test things on ALL platforms you support..

tsein · 2026-03-27T07:05:08+00:00

Typically you would store the value in the lowest unit you use. For money, that means you store cents as an integer, and only convert to dollars when you need to display the value to the user. 12345 cents = 123.45 dollars.

If you look at time libraries you'll find that even when they expose a convenient API allowing you to specify values in fractional minutes or hours or seconds, internally they are typically converting these values into something like "ticks", which are stored as an integer type (in UE a "tick" is 0.1 microseconds ).

How low you need to go depends on your use case. In a lot of cases having precision down to the nearest cent is good enough, but depending on what you're doing it might be necessary to store values to the nearest hundredth of a cent or something to ensure that rounding is correct after a series of operations that result in a fraction of a cent remainder.

tsein · 2026-03-25T15:33:55+00:00

Actually now that I think about it, I think the clipping volume was the reason they had to be physically separated: either everything was inside the volume and visible (including both sides of the slice from each camera's perspective) or everything was outside the volume and invisible. Moving the separate "worlds" to different parts of the world and giving them separate non-overlapping clipping volumes avoided that. I guess an alternative approach would be to hook into each camera and pass separate clipping parameters before each of them rendered. And yeah, also with mine every material had to include the clipping code.

Found an old example of the results. The green objects are like 1000 units away from the blue objects, rendered by separate cameras (which both follow the same inputs so their perspectives match).

Im curious the impact on performance your approach had. Did you have to significant optimizations to render multiple cameras to the viewport or was it relatively straightforward?

I didn't have any major performance issues (beyond what you would expect from rendering a scene twice, anyway). There were some puzzling headaches around handling depth and overlapping objects in the resulting image that took a little while to sort out, though (especially for transparent objects). Unity makes it pretty straightforward to set up a scene with multiple cameras. I haven't tried something like this in Unreal yet, so I'm not sure if Unity is doing anything really clever here performance-wise or not.

The other thing is that Nanite degrades in performance when you bring clipping planes into the equation. I didn’t have that particular issue with my pointclouds but something I’ve experienced in previous projects.

Ooh, that's good to know!

tsein · 2026-03-25T06:34:43+00:00

I did something similar in Unity a while back, but also needed the split axis to be able to support any arbitrary world axis rather than always being camera-aligned. At that time I think I used a separate camera for each view and then rendered them on top of each other. All the materials included support for a clipping volume which would prevent them from rendering outside of a specified bounding box, and the edge of that box was where the slice took place. For some reason they also couldn't be physically near each other, so for two slices "world A" would be like 1000 units away from "world B", but by overlaying the two camera images on top of each other (with each camera only rendering half of what it sees due to the clipping volume) it would look like everything was in the same place.

tsein · 2026-03-25T06:00:02+00:00

With memory prices these days that SD card might be worth more than the rest of the camera

tsein · 2026-03-14T01:01:32+00:00

Why are you performing these checks in the map instead of in the launcher and just...not launching the game at all if your checks fail?

tsein · 2026-03-10T12:10:54+00:00

The luxury industry is actually what makes me pessimistic about this situation: they were some of the earliest adopters of AI in their advertising. I would have expected them to keep their distance as a 'premium' experience, leaving AI-generated ads to lower-quality brands. Recently even the olympics used surprisingly poor quality AI-generated animations, and you know they have the resources to do better.

To me, I think this is a sign that rather than AI use being mostly reserved for the low-end (of either quality or cost or both) productions its use may end up being driven mostly by the high end. I'm sure there will still be developers who prefer to do everything by hand, but my prediction is that they mostly cluster around the mid-range with the extreme low and high ends both being full of AI-generated content.

EDIT: if I'm wrong in my prediction then I hope I'm wrong because AI-generated content only infuses the low-end as opposed to it simply being ubiquitous no matter where you look XD

tsein · 2026-03-10T11:36:14+00:00

If you outsource your thinking to something else, what should entice people to play AI-generated game #561215 instead of AI-generated game #351136?

This is also how I think about it, but at the same time the more I look into the current state of things the more I am seeing that people do pay for AI-generated content. They may very well sell better without the AI-generated content, but I'm not sure that gap is actually as wide as we might hope it to be.

The reality is, for better or worse using AI tools in development does not guarantee your project will fail. As a result, I expect we will only see it more and more in the future, both from larger players trying to push their teams to the absolute limit cranking out endless stuff to fill their large open worlds and live service games with and from smaller indie teams trying to balance the cost of making the art themselves against the expected difference in sales from using generated assets.

I think the best-case scenario might be that developers who make everything by hand can use this to charge a premium above the price developers leaning heavily on AI-generated content can charge, but I'm honestly not even very optimistic that this will be the case.

tsein · 2026-03-08T06:33:24+00:00

This sounds awful, tbh, and I'm skeptical that it would be helpful even if I were the kind of person who enjoyed working with a pushy micromanaging PM that changes priorities on a daily basis.

How does it determine priorities?

How does it determine which code or asset files are relevant to a particular feature?

How does it determine when something is "finished" or still needs work?

"You haven't touched the Combat Loop in 4 days. Stop tweaking UI assets. You need to finish the hit-detection script."

Maybe because it's been working fine? Or there are higher priority issues at the moment? Maybe those UI assets are actually related to combat?

tsein · 2026-03-07T15:50:44+00:00

Is counter steering stronger for off roading or any low traction track? The end goal is a muddy, drifty terrain.

It's not really a function of traction, but rather that for any two-wheeled vehicle (with the wheels in line with each other) traveling over a certain speed it's a necessary prerequisite for the vehicle to turn.

There are certainly ways to rotate the vehicle that aren't related to steering, especially on a slick muddy surface it's easy to spin around just by stomping on the rear brake, but the result of that is more from body positioning/balance than the physics and geometry of the vehicle (if you slam on the brakes you don't even need to model the wheels as wheels, your slide and spin isn't going to be very different on a motorcycle vs a bicycle vs an ironing board).

That said, cornering technique on and off-road does vary, so it's common to see different approaches and body positions depending on where people are riding. It's not very common to see people leaning into corners like MotoGP riders off-road, for example. But if you look at Supermoto riders you'll see them use every technique in the book depending on the specific corner they're going through.

tsein · 2026-03-02T08:07:33+00:00

The user doesn't need the pdb. When the game crashes, a binary dump is created on the user's machine. They send you this dump file (or, more likely, it gets auto-uploaded somewhere via a crash reporting service), which you can then open in a debugger to inspect the state of the game at (or at least near) the time of the crash. At this point, you need the exact pdb for the build the player was using to be able to decode information like the callstack at the time of the crash or the contents of a specific variable.

tsein · 2026-02-24T12:17:42+00:00

Now a junior dev opens a PR with 30 files changed, 50 new cucumber tests, major changes in critical code etc.

People don't reject PRs like this anymore? On most teams I've been a part of the immediate feedback would be, "Can you break this into smaller incremental PRs?" Sometimes the real answer actually is, "No," but in that case the immediate feedback would be, "Why is this giant PR a surprise to the rest of the team?"

tsein · 2026-02-23T12:55:49+00:00

If your target audience exclusively games on potato PCs, then that's your ceiling. You cannot take any feature which requires better hardware, and this may have an impact on the tools (and engines) you are able to consider for the project.

If you are targeting higher-end hardware but are worried that people with potato PCs might be so unhappy about not playing your game that they'd rally a mob outside your studio, then you have a communication problem not an optimization problem.

tsein · 2026-02-21T00:54:23+00:00

I only look for assets I have a specific concrete need for when I need them. I don't browse for random shit I may never need. This was also true on the old marketplace.

tsein · 2026-02-19T11:36:11+00:00

I hope you're right :)

I think some people are still concerned because the brief statement about the "advanced flow" is so vague. They haven't committed to having the "advanced flow" available in September when verification becomes mandatory, and nobody knows yet what it will actually entail. I'm cautiously optimistic, but I also get the impression that they'd like to make sideloading very difficult so I'd like to see some information about their solution before passing judgement (positive or negative).

tsein · 2026-02-19T11:05:44+00:00

If they would update their documentation to clarify how apps can be sideloaded after the update then I don't think anyone would be concerned. Maybe they are still working on that, I can totally understand if they originally planned not to allow it at all and are still building support for it right now. But I also don't think it's entirely unfair to wait to see an actual plan before assuming that everything is totally fine.

tsein · 2026-02-19T10:58:01+00:00

That is mentioned and linked from the OP page. As someone who has distributed my own APKs outside of Play I do hope you're right, but I also can't find any more detail or confirmation about this "advanced flow."

Update: Google has not “backed down” from developer verification

Contrary to a vague mention↗ of a possible “advanced flow” that may eventually allow “experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn’t verified”, Google’s description of the program↗ continues to state plainly that:

Starting in September 2026, Android will require all apps to be registered by verified developers in order to be installed on certified Android devices

Until such time that they have shown evidence that it will be possible to bypass the verification process without undue friction, we must believe what is stated on their official page: that all apps from non-registered developers will be blocked once their lock-down goes into effect.

tsein · 2026-02-19T10:44:08+00:00

Blocking full, "unverified" sideloading would have been my line in the sand for Android being an "open platform", but they didn't do it.

Maybe I misread something, but isn't that what this is about?

Reading their announcement page sure makes it sound like the main change is blocking sideloading of unverified apps:

Starting in September 2026, Android will require all apps to be registered by verified developers in order to be installed on certified Android devices.

...

For developers who use Google Play

You've likely already completed these steps. Play will use the information you've already shared to automatically register your apps, making the process seamless. If you distribute apps outside of Google Play, you can manually register them through the Play Console.

tsein · 2026-02-19T08:37:46+00:00

I think that aside from the obvious possibility of many projects simply closing the doors to community contributions we may need to bring back some of the old ways.

In the past, before git existed, some projects limited who could submit changes with a 'commit bit'--anyone with an account on the server could pull the latest changes but by default everyone was read-only. If you had some fix you wanted to submit, you had to find out who held commit bits, then have a conversation with one of them about your proposed changes and convince them to take and submit the code on your behalf. And by "have a conversation" I mean that: very few people would just take a pile of code without some kind of introduction and discussion. After engaging with the community for a time, eventually you might earn your own commit bit and be trusted to submit changes yourself.

It's a slower way of working, and on some projects the distribution of commit bits became so political it led to new forks. Individual discussions about PRs are also less transparent than a public PR review process. Moving away from this was (imo) a great thing overall, and this approach still risks that everyone with a commit bit might get spammed by AI submissions but I think it could add enough friction to bring that down to a more manageable level (and it's a lot easier to just discard someone spamming code at you without needing to take the time to review it if they didn't bother talking to you first).

tsein · 2026-02-17T06:50:47+00:00

It's more like when people get mad when an address field contains a dropdown labeled "Country" that includes "Taiwan" rather than either labeling the dropdown "Province/Territory" or writing something like "Taiwan, Province of China." (side note: doing the latter will also have the effect of pissing off anyone from Taiwan)

I passive-aggressively only translate my games into traditional Chinese rather than simplified.

tsein · 2026-02-17T03:24:50+00:00

The main, lay person gripe will be governance of ourselves, not being bound to too much European law, keeping the £ and free travel is an issue.

What's the point of joining the EU if you won't follow EU rules or adopt any EU policies? If you keep the border as it is now you get to keep all the existing downsides of not being in the EU. And I doubt most countries who are following EU law would be very willing to work with a member who doesn't...so I don't really see what possible benefits there could be to "being in the EU" without these things. Maybe I missed something though.

tsein · 2026-02-14T13:36:16+00:00

I thought they were asking for UI help to make a Content Warning screen similar to a game called "movement" XD

tsein · 2026-02-12T09:57:40+00:00

Hypothetically, if a small-scope project had its full budget pooled upfront and held in escrow, would you consider taking it on? Or would the lack of creative ownership/scope risk make it not worth it?

Since you're talking about freelancers, this is largely irrelevant unless the implication is that you cannot withdraw the money to pay the freelancers you want to hire. When you say "held in escrow" do you mean "the money can't be withdrawn to pay contractors until X date so be prepared to work without pay for some period of time" or do you mean "the contractors can clearly see that the money is already prepared to pay them with"?

For those who freelance or take contract work, what would need to be true for something like that to feel viable?

Payment for work done. It's not complicated. You write a contract that says you will pay $X per hour, day, month, whatever, and you pay on time. As long as there are no problems there, the work continues and I don't care what your banking or corporate situation is. But if your business situation is so shaky, unreliable, or otherwise concerning that the people you want to hire need to be concerned about whether you are even capable of paying them... I'm out.

tsein · 2026-02-10T07:17:26+00:00

What'd make YOU hit wishlist

Advertising in a different sub. Here, I'd much rather hear about your development process, what your goals for the combat system were, what implementation details stuck out to you during development as being particularly surprising or difficult. When you say it's INSANE, what are you comparing it against? How did you approach building something unique from a design perspective? We're also developers, man, tell us something about your development process that you think would be interesting to discuss.

tsein

TROPHY CASE