awesome plugin, really recomend!

This all started accelerating around the time I was hitting 40 and having various long covid symptoms, so you can imagine how paranoid I was for a while, but no, it's definitely the tech

Merged the preview into main and uploaded the precompiled release as zips for for #unrealengine 5.4-5.7

Also added a couple new examples to the interactive examples browser, including vertex shader shenanigans to expand your SDF glows outside of the widget geometry :)
github.com/rtm223/RTMSDF

Almost every piece of software I interact with has just been continuously degrading in a way that feels like it can't possibly be real, but it absolutely is

You can, and you can get chlumsky's msdfgen to output that (he refers to it at a "pseudo distance field" iirc). You lose a small amount of accuracy when sampling between pixels of the sdf though, as you're interpolating the baked median, rather than reconstructing it from the distance channels

Every "centrist" pundit with a complaint about the bluesky echo chamber:

wow big numbers!

"People wanted my product too much" shouldn't cause you to lose money, that's just not how that works in a real company. What the fuck are you doing Sam??

Need to retvrn to baked lights

happy easter

I'm more than skeptical of that idea, but at the same time, interest in indies is consistently pretty good?

I feel like the main thing right now is it's more important than ever to be keeping your min spec low, as people just aren't gonna be buying new hardware for a while

I'd originally planned to separate out some of this stuff as a premium version of the plugin to sell (while keeping the free one on github), but a mixture of laziness / generosity (you can guess the relative weighting there) has led me to just push it all to github

There's some pretty try-hard documentation in there as well, that I autogenerate from the material functions themselves, which is pretty cool github.com/rtm223/RTMSD...

GitHub - rtm223/RTMSDF at rel/1.2 2D signed distance field generators & importers for Unreal Engine 5 - rtm223/RTMSDF

Preview version 1.2 of my #UE5 SDF plugin is in github now. This release mostly adds 73 material functions for manipulating 2D SDFs and generating those good procedural SDF shapes that we all love

Prebuilt releases should be available tomorrowish

github.com/rtm223/RTMSD... #gamedev #unrealengine

It's "videogames" you heathen!

“Everyone from Walmart to your local bodega will need to maintain a presence in Fortnite to stay relevant” is so profoundly stupid I’m just glad I have the documentation to prove someone legitimately believed it.

It's probably why so many of them radicalised on twitter - they were finally exposed to a lot of people who weren't paid to nod along with their nonsense

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a little bit easier to understand in physical play, where the toy/other components of a game are separated from the rules. In digital (esp in videogames) they tend to be intertwined, so it's harder to conceptualize

I'm unclear on the emphasis here. If you're saying a toy cannot be used outside of game structures then I think that's demonstrably false. It's just that unstructured play is something that adults in our society often have a hard time doing

If you mean that toys can form part of a game then sure

Also, to be clear, I had absolutely zero impact or influence on what those games were, nor on their success, I just helped them communicate their vision through the lens of "toy" vs "game"

Yeah, absolutely. And I don't even think it's a hard delineation, as structure is a dial you can turn up and down, creating maybe a toy-game continuum?

I reject this idea for slightly different reasons, but broadly agree with you
bsky.app/profile/rtm2...

I think you could make the argument that games become a subset of toys by adding structure, but I think that fundamentally devalues unstructured play as its own thing

Same thing with Townscaper. There was a brief window when Oskar was unsure of the concept and I told him the same thing: you're not making a game, you're making a toy and you need to lean into that for this to work

Back when Landfall were making TABS, they had a difficult time talking to partners in videogames about what the game was, because of it's unstructured and doesn't fit. But I encouraged them to talk about it as a digital toy, and then people got it

I'd say this a complete misunderstanding of what toys and games are, because a game is inherently structured play, and a toy enables unstructured play

And I have seen this with wildly successful digital toys that tried to present as games

He's been doing that little Monday morning market manipulation thing for a while now

This could just be to emotionally destroy investors over the long weekend, before he pops up Tuesday morning to tell them everything's gonna be great and they all rush to receive their "fell for it again" awards

Mate, they found the vectors that push the model towards certain sentiments. If you go looking for it, you could find the vectors that push the model towards iambic pentameter, or being more sycophantic, or flirty, or imitating a noir detective. That's all this is. Anything else is projection

I love this stupid rat

That's not what's happening though. The paper stresses multiple times that it's NOT equivalent to biological emotion