I spent a good chunk of time watching music videos on YouTube tonight. Generation Axe is playing in Vancouver on Wednesday. I have no tickets. This makes me mildly sad, but at the same time I I’m struggling to justify the cost of admission to myself. But at least I got some learnin’ in too. Read More >

Huh. I hadn’t really been paying attention. It turns out that Udemy has just changed their pricing strategy. Instead of allowing instructors to charge whatever price they wish for the content they provide, they now charge between $20 and $50 per course. This means that the Learn to Code in C++ course is now a mere $35. I can’t help but feel mildly agitated at having backed the course for £45 on Kickstarter now that I know I could have spent less. That said, I’m glad that Ben got the funding he asked for, and I feel that this has been the best course I’ve taken. So… I’ll try not to get too disgruntled.

As a side note, I’m now on the fence about what that means going forward with my own plans. I had it in my mind that I was going to produce some Houdini training material for the website… but now I’m not so sure it’s worth while when I can’t price at what I feel to be an appropriate rate. Or maybe instead of developing a “proper” curriculum I would need to break it up into digestible chunks for a smaller price point? It feels like a shame that people will be limited to buying piecemeal courses for a low price. But I guess it just means that teachers will need to migrate to a different platform going forward.

At any rate, I didn’t get as much done today as I’d hoped, but it was a good day nonetheless. Read More >

I set out yesterday to start playing Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams, which is on my list of games I own which I should be playing so that I can force myself to learn Japanese. I don’t know what to say… I played the first two levels, and I just had no fun at all. And there are a ton more menu screens than there were in Brothers. Part of me wants to stay focused and translate that shit… but it’s not going to be fun, and if I’m not having fun in my leisure hours, what’s the point? So instead of torturing myself playing that game, I’m taking it off my To Play list, and moving on.

And in this case, moving on means doing more tutorials. Read More >

I’ve only been able to make it through about one and a half of these a night the past few nights. The more exhausted you get, the harder it is to take in increasingly technical concepts. The last lecture doesn’t make a ton of sense to me at all this fine dark almost 2AM, so I’m going to head to sleep now that I’ve got some basic collision detection happening. Read More >

Udemy’s interface had just been changed, but I think it’s been sorted now… so the numbering back on track again. In this collection, we simply set up volumes to prevent escape of the room, make a trigger that closes the door after x amount of time, and then set up the basics needed so that we have a DefaultPawn character of our choice being used when we start a game. Read More >

Interesting, the layout has been changed on the Udemy course, and while I was previously prepared to start Lecture 59 today, it looks as though I’m now at Lecture 65. I’m not sure how exactly the course structure has changed, but it doesn’t look as though I’ve missed anything. Meanwhile, this series of lessons sees us learn how to access transform information, manipulate transform information, do some basic layout of geometry, use the UPROPERTY macro, and use a trigger in combination with the player to open the door. Read More >

It’s oddly satisfying to get some C++ working and see a connection with UE4, even if it’s as minor as printing a Warning message in the output. At least I can rest assured that all the perforce set-up I’ve done is working. Read More >

Alright, well I’ve had a little bit of time to poke around, and so far it seems that things aren’t as bad as I dreaded after upgrading to Windows 10. Only a very small number of minor issues at the moment, though I’ll be sure to keep you updated if I come across anything major. So I’ll talk very briefly on that process, on some additional work I did in preparation for following more of the Unreal/C++ tutorials, and then I’ll go to sleep. As I always do. Sweet… sweet sleep, you sultry siren… Read More >

This involved a lot of getting my source control working… and I’m honestly not 100% confident in what I’ve done… the SourceTree solution that is being used in these videos seems more straight forward than Perforce, which is what I’ve decided to use out of habit. But as I’m not much for setting up pipelines, this could end up causing me a lot of headache. Read More >