How Might We Learn?

On an immersive future of learning

AMAA - HItchhikers Guide to the Atmosphere

Ask me anything AT Protocol, with guests!

Local-first software: pragmatism vs idealism

Bryan Newbold: Protocol engineering

A protocol engineer at the social-media platform Bluesky describes building an open protocol around a fast-growing social media platform.

Using your AT proto stuff in your other web stuff: A guide for ATstronauts who want to just do stuff...

It's easy peasy, don't be scared!

Semble Roadmap • cosmik-network

A rough ordering and timeline for Semble's feature roadmap

Getting started with Doom Emacs — A great transition from Vim to Emacs

So you just installed Emacs(make sure it’s 26+!) and you want to see what all the fuss is about. Why should I use this instead of my…

Noel Welsh: Doom Emacs Workflows

I recently switched to Doom Emacs from Spacemacs. The Doom documentation is currently quite sparse, so I've posted here my personal notes on using Doom along with a description of my workflow (something I find vital but missing from most documentation). Doom might be for you if

a quest tool i made once

Some years ago I did a quest scripting tool for an ill-fated open-world game I was contracting on. It was ages ago now, the project’s concluded, and nothing here identifies any of it, so I’m sure nobody’ll mind if I talk about my approach a bit here.

dev scoops: some narrative advice a Valve person gave me once

Many years ago when I was a tiny baby making InFlux (of which there is now a Redux), I had no idea what I wanted to do with it narratively, if anything. Because, from a young age, he had humoured me, I emailed Gabe Newell about it, knowing he was in the habit of either replying or forwarding to someone he thought might reply. I got some good thoughts back from David Speyrer, who’s been at Valve since ’99, which I shall publish here now because at a party last night someone was interested.

tech art thing: mist-dispelling lights

A while ago I made a cool effect for Sleight of Hand, where (since you hide in clouds of smoke sometimes in this magic-themed game), we were experimenting with a type of lantern that guards could carry around and it would dispel any smoke or fog around the light. The fog is all volumetric, so cutting through it in a way that looks good is easily done with a spheremask, but that doesn’t handle occlusion (removing smoke on the other side of a wall from the light). In our game it’s probably not important to handle that case, but I did it anyway using Niagara, and the result looks pretty sick.

design thoughts: let things be rare

It’s true and weird that while both Half-Life games are considered influential and important, hardly any of what was uniquely compelling about them made it into anything else. It’s still hard to find anything that feels like it does what they did: dynamically-chatty bit-part characters with interesting behaviours, NPC classes with specific attitudes to each other, dozens of elaborate one-off scripted behaviours, the continuous sense of not being the main character. Both games are full of stubs of situations that you could build a whole game around.

new tool: Impromptu Texture Browser

This is a “texture browser” utility widget for UE5.5 that presents materials in the style you’d expect from a level editor in the 90s: as square thumbnails.

Unreal Scoop: Data-Driven CVars

If you use UE5, you might have noticed there’s a new-ish feature called Data-Driven Console Variables, and you might also have noticed that nothing comes up when you Google this. There’s not much to it, but in the interests of having something come up when you Google this, here’s what I’ve figured out about data-driven cvars.

Unreal Scoop: Make your own “shaded textured unlit” viewmode real quick

Hammer, king of level editors, has a view mode where the scene is unlit, but not fullbright; it’s shaded to make it easier to parse. Unreal doesn’t have that! But you can add it yourself, really easily, with no C++ or Blueprint – just a postprocess material and a line in a config file. Here’s how!

Unreal Scoop: Making a “Compiling Shaders…” Screen

Unreal has a reputation amoung the ill-informed for being plagued by shader compilation stutter. As an attribute of Unreal itself, this is basically made up – devs are just not always doing what they are supposed to do pre-ship to avoid this issue. I’ll elaborate, but basically, to avoid compiling shaders during gameplay, you want to do it up-front, like during an initial loading screen, which maybe says “Compiling shaders” on it, and not let the player begin until it’s done. To do that last part properly, you need a little bit of C++. I had to do this for InFlux Redux recently, so here’s mine.

Unreal Engine Plugins That I Reckon Are Good

Mesh Tool by Nate Mary is a general modeling tool and the best way to do level design in the editor, though UE5’s CubeGrid tool is really good too (but has fewer functions than this). You can use both together, both just output meshes. I asked Nate to add Hotspot Texturing like Source 2 has, and the madman did it. The pictures above are all of MeshTool stuff, all of it whipped up real quick.

Add a web app manifest  |  Articles  |  web.dev

The web app manifest is a simple JSON file that tells the browser how your web app should behave.

AT friends #4 & #5: @gabboman.at.app.wafrn.net and @djara.dev of Wafrn - Jake Simonds

informal chats with people building cool stuff in the open social world