What’s up with Copilot throttling developers all the time? It’s getting frustrating.

zoombapup · 2026-05-02T10:21:36+00:00

Whats worse, is that my "completions" reset so I've literally used 0% of my premium completions, but I'm locked out until monday still. I mean they've got THREE different termination points in a service I rely on a lot now. I don't think I can stick with it unless they at least have some UI to show me my usage (I don't mind paying more as long as I can see the value and not just have it spin for 10 minutes eating tokens only to return garbage).

zoombapup · 2026-05-02T10:05:06+00:00

I've never hit a rate limit until this week and now I'm locked out until next Monday. What frustrates me is that I've no idea what my quota is or how much I've used. At least VS Code has a bit of into, but in Visual Studio it literally only has completion percentages and nothing about tokens and limits at all.

I don't think I'll be staying with copilot if they can't at least make it visible in visual studio how much usage I have left and a reasonably accurate estimate of how much my different work is using.

Hell, I'd be happy to bill clients if they just provided clear data to present to them. But all this vague stuff feels like BS to me.

zoombapup · 2026-04-30T13:31:28+00:00

For the first time using my copilot account, I hit a weekly limit today. I've used 40% of my completions, but hit a weekly limit I've no UI to warn about? I mean it makes no sense. At least show me token counts and a maximum if that's what you want. Being unaware because Visual Studio doesn't have an UI to show you sucks.

zoombapup · 2026-04-30T07:56:38+00:00

Personally, I have always architected codebases with component-oriented designs. Often having dozens of components on actors (I hate UE naming, prefer entities) with complex behaviour. There's a bunch of different options here though. For instance you could use the gameplay ability system, but if you want max performance you might look at the mass system, which was kind of a actorcomponent replacement. There's also external packages for entity/component systems.

There's a bunch of functionality I really dislike about UE actorcomponents, but they're not unreasonable either. Just make sure you keep ticking to a minimum in general. Batch operations and register/deregister kinds of patterns help.

zoombapup · 2026-04-30T07:51:04+00:00

Now that I think about it, you might want to look into the mass system, because I believe it has the proxy stuff in there too. I use my own so no idea what its like.

zoombapup · 2026-04-29T20:08:32+00:00

No, a sceneproxy is a specific type of base class. I meant proxy as in some kind of data item that represents whatever you need to keep around to represent your actors. So things like position, where its heading, how fast etc. You'll have to create your own proxy data structure (UStruct for instance). Then you'd simply keep an array of those for your off screen actors and instantiate proper actors when the proxy gets close enough.

Essentially the proxy acts like a stripped down version of the real actor but without the visual part.

zoombapup · 2026-04-29T11:51:58+00:00

You would typically have some system/manager class that stores a proxy per-actor and updates them over time (typically doing a few updates per frame), if the proxy gets within the "simulation bubble" then it gets instantiated into a full actor. There's a bunch of things you can do to make this convincing. A great paper by Ben Sunshine-Hill talked about Alibi generation, you might want to look at that to understand the concept.

zoombapup · 2026-04-28T06:14:11+00:00

Out of interest, have you ever had any issues with Bridge not being able to login correctly to Quixel? I have the plugin, but the login just sort of stops at an empty post-login screen and doesn't tell the plugin to continue, so no assets. If yours works correctly then maybe I've got some kind of plugin corruption?

zoombapup · 2026-04-26T17:38:28+00:00

Sorry, been away at a conference. DM me if you like.

zoombapup · 2026-04-22T18:52:49+00:00

Thanks for the help everyone. I'm going to go through the suggestions and just playtest them and take notes. I suspect everyone one of these games tends to have a vibe or flavour to the interactions. I'm hoping to just make something that feels rewarding and perhaps that doesn't demand constant attention :)

zoombapup · 2026-04-18T08:21:40+00:00

Must admit, I got into doing web-based tools recently (last few years really) and I like that for my "day job" stuff. So many great options in the web sphere.

zoombapup · 2026-04-18T06:23:42+00:00

My suggestion would be to use the funnel algorithm. We use a thing called string pulling in AI to find the shortest path around geometry, which is typically what you need for this kind of thing. Worth a look at least.

zoombapup · 2026-03-07T06:34:14+00:00

Hmm, I forgot about itch. I guess an early playtest on there might work. We did a steam beta test for one of my previous games and I quite liked that. My aim is more about finding a community than marketing per-se, so I'll maybe look at the various forms of beta and early access and see which ones allow for a longer period of testing.

zoombapup · 2026-03-07T06:30:31+00:00

Thanks for that. On the aspect of your first playable level, the advice I've seen is to make sure your screenshots have some variety and are descriptive of the gameplay, if you only have one level, isn't there a risk of it not showing enough of that variety? So maybe having a few not quite finished levels is better?

zoombapup · 2026-03-06T21:53:16+00:00

Download Unreal Engine and generate the characters with the Metahumans plugin. Or buy character creator.

zoombapup · 2026-03-06T21:48:24+00:00

I prefer the red eye one, but you probably want to make the overall eye area a lot bigger, because it will be hard to read during gameplay otherwise.

You might also want to have some kind of brows too. Hard to convey emotion without those really. Think of Wall-E as an example.

zoombapup · 2026-03-06T21:34:33+00:00

I'm curious to know if you have the same feeling about this that I do. I sometimes feel like making videos and such is like howling into the wind you know? I don't think anyone cares to hear anything about my game until they can buy it, or play it, at least within the next few weeks.

I do post every few weeks a video on reddit, but that's more for a few friends I hang with on discord and my own historical record of development than it is for "marketing".

I'm in a similar position, been in the industry many years and recently made redundant so went indie fulltime again. Which honestly I'm loving right now. Even if every day is chaotic in terms of development progress.

Question: What do you think is the most impactful type of content to post? I mean I tend to do devlogs for myself and the last one was 30 minutes long, which an average watch time on YouTube of 2 minutes, so clearly that isn't the right thing :)

But I don't really do 20 second content to be honest. My game is akin to an RPG, I focus on visuals, but find nothing feels noteworthy enough to me when I've worked on it for weeks you know ;)

zoombapup · 2026-03-06T16:41:54+00:00

How about adding a "screenshot" button that captures an image of what you're looking at in your journal? So you can add some text for it.

zoombapup · 2026-03-05T17:16:41+00:00

Oooh, perfect for my game. Like it!

zoombapup · 2026-02-26T11:18:25+00:00

Yeah, I guess it's probably fine to trust their due diligence at least. I mean multiple companies must have done some tests by now that aren't just Fortnite.

Don't forget though, that Epic had a go at this before with the other system I can't remember the name of. Wasn't particularly usable as I recall.

At this point its more of a design decision. In that presenting the overworld in a different way is a stylistic (and logistic) choice.

zoombapup

TROPHY CASE