One of the things I keep trying to do is improve the speed with which I can transfer words or commands from my brain into the computer. Typing is the default interface for this so I’ve tried to find ways to speed this up so I can code and write faster.

When you setup Unreal Engine through the Epic Games launcher a file association is setup to allow tools to find your engine install, and enable some shell menu items when you right click on a uproject file.

This isn’t setup by default when you build from source, but it’s really easy to do.

Normally I might write a post about the year that passed and what’s coming for 2019, but considering the lack of content that I’ve been able to write about this year, I should probably pick a larger timeframe.

In October of 2014 I joined a little animation company here in Sydney named Animal Logic. Earlier that year they released a film that caught the world by surprise: The Lego Movie.

We recently hit an issue with a system at work which manually linked against the CUDA driver API at runtime. One function used to retrieve the memory limit of the GPU was always returning a 32 bit value even if the card had >4GB of VRAM and we were passing a 64 bit integer. On further investigation through forums we discovered the function originally took a 32bit integer and there was a newer version with the same name.

Introduction & Motivation

Works for SDK version 1.0.3

A few weeks ago Vulkan 1.0 was released to the public, which marked the first time those outside of Khronos saw the API and SDK (provided by LunarG). If you have a relatively recent Ubuntu (or debian) OS install, or Windows, you can just download the SDK from the Official Website.

At Animal Logic we use an older version of CentOS that aligns with the VFX reference platform rather than the latest and greatest. This however means that our version of GLIBC is older than what you may find in more recent Ubuntu installs, which LunarG targetted for the Linux SDK.

Over the last year and a half I’ve been involved in porting many games over to the Windows (tablet/desktop) and Phone platforms with Marker Metro. (Some examples in my portfolio)

While doing this I have built up a small set of invaluable tools to assist with the task. I decided I should probably post this small list up in case some of these are new to anyone out there.

Unity recently added some excellent 2D tools to their engine, which filled a hole that previously required third party plugins or a lot of effort for simple games. Now that we have these new tools, we need to learn how to use them. Simon Jackson, known for his Darkside Genesis blog and efforts in the Monogame community wrote a book that seeks to do just that.

I was recently given a copy of the book to read through and provide my thoughts so here they are in full. Hopefully they’re useful to you. Note that I won’t go in depth about the topics the book covers. These can be found on the Packt website for the book, which you can find a link for at the end of this post.

One of the things I’ve been meaning to do recently is post about the ID@Xbox presentations that were on at GDC this year. Quite a lot of information was provided outside of the standard NDA that people have to sign at the official ID@Xbox events and so I thought that I should put this information online somewhere so that others can find out what was presented. (The sessions were not recorded) I did not attend all sessions and so my notes are fairly incomplete and lack information about the Kinect and LIVE SDK.

NGUI is widely used, and upgrading from older versions can be challenging depending on the complexity of your game. I have seen this issue pop up a few times while converting projects and thought I might note it down with a quick solution.

When converting to the Windows Store or Windows Phone you might encounter an issue where a button seems to do nothing when tapped. This occurs because the OnClick event is actually firing twice, in quick succession, often cancelling out the effect of the original press.

Direct3D Rendering Cookbook

Author: Justin Stenning Packt Publishing
Book Website

One of the areas I avoided covering in too much detail in my book was the area of 3D rendering. This is an area that can become fairly complex and requires knowledge of pipelines and other systems that can get in the way of learning the basics about game development. Naturally however, many will want to expand into this area once they have a grasp of the basics. Thanks to Packt, I will be taking a look at a book that may help with this, the Direct3D Rendering Cookbook, by Justin Stenning.