Had  some trouble today with the site and deleted everything from the NAS thinking it was at fault.
In fact, it was my router – probably running its last legs.

Anyway, it was a great opportunity to clean things up, I jettisoned everything, reinstalled fresh software, only WordPress and MariaDB10, not bothering with phpMyAdmin anymore and all is well, faster than before.
I also cleaned the WordPress modules I do not use, I didn’t even remember what some of them were doing.

And finally, I removed completely my WordPress site on wordpress.com, it was useless anyway since plugins are not allowed on free accounts.

Shadow is the company’s name.
What they propose is basically streaming a gaming session: the game you’re playing runs on a remote Shadow machine and is rendered on your PC, phone, tablet or TV through their proprietary software; you don’t need a powerful PC anymore, all you need is a decent internet connection and you’re good to go.

But Shadow is already a thing of the past before being a thing of the future – phew! progress goes faster and faster!
Nvidia and AMD are teaming up with small family businesses like LG and Google to bring the whole concept to a new level.
By the looks of it – be warned, strong Scottish accent, pretty funny actually – we will now be able, when watching let’s say a trailer on Youtube about the latest Assassin’s Creed, to click on a button on the screen and be immediately playing the game in our own session!

Google is first on the list because they already have hundreds of data centers all over the world, own submarine cables and an infrastructure which makes Terminator’s Skynet look like a child toy.

Regardless of who’s going to make it first: it’s coming.
Watch your PC closely, it might be the last you ever buy.

I’m out of words, so pardon my French.

I’m in the 17th lesson – over 85 – in my current Udemy UE4 course and I – literally – don’t know whether to go cry in a corner and beg for mercy or burst into frantic joy laughter – like maniacally.

Unreal is insane – no pun intended. Everything is possible, every single mesh, texture, effect, whatever, can be created, manipulated, modified in real time, there is a solution to each and every problem, I’m flabbergasted with the endless possibilities.

What the hell is he on? might you ask. Well, let me give you an example.
In NWN, there are standard animations. For example, when you’re designing a chest, you have to provide the open and close animations in the model. Not in UE4. You just import the mesh, and that’s it. Upon importing the mesh into the engine, you then can add a timeline to any action on the chest to open it over how many seconds you want, at the speed you want and even with the speed variations you want and it can even be different according to your class, the quest you’re on or any parameter you might think of!

Even texture materials can be modified in real time.
Well, in a nutshell: anything!

The course I’m following is very well structured, I encounter very few problems, I understand everything the instructor is explaining, but the problem is: will I remember all of that when the time will come to put everything to work in Althea 3?

A part of me says: ‘Forget it, way too complicated, even the instructor messes things up at times!’ – which is true – and another part whispers: ‘Dude, this is the time of your life, materialize your dreams, you can make it!’

To be completely honest, this is insane, I have to assimilate in a few weeks what would usually take years of learning-practicing.

– ‘You won’t make it’
– ‘Yes, I will’
– ‘Nah, you won’t’
– ‘Shut up! I will’
– ‘Awkey, if you say so’. Turns around giggling.

Erm… shall I, really?

The full text can be read here, but it’s not really worth reading to be honest, no details are unveiled yet, we only know we won’t be having a new patch for months, until they are done with the 64bit binaries, console controls and the new renderer.

It’s likely the new renderer will be able to use more texture maps, maybe PBR materials, but I don’t think they are going to touch the engine which will leave us with flat 360/360 meters maps.
And quite frankly, it doesn’t cut it.

I was very vocal about how graphics don’t matter and only content/gameplay is important, but I was wrong: people just don’t play old games for more than a few hours of nostalgia. Usually; they are always exceptions or course, but it’s not worth it developing on an old engine, in my opinion.

I started programming computers in 1981.
At that time, not only was it possible to master all existing software but also to write your own and even build a computer by yourself, building the PCB following your own design and buying the components, including the CPU, from your local electronics shop. The most expensive CPU was around the equivalent of 50€ back then, compared to the 500€+ of a 9900k today.

35 years later, there is nothing left of that era.
Even the simplest of all software, word processing, is now so complex that many students fail at formatting their papers properly and don’t even know how to make an automatic table of contents. I have written five novels so far and only used a handful of the functionalities modern word processing software feature.

When it comes to game engines, they are so complex that even the company employees barely know the parts they are not working on.
Unreal Engine sports hundreds of functions, each with up to 20 parameters, on top of a hundreds of functions rich API.
Building the lighting of a scene, for example, is, depending on the way you look a it, a miracle or a nightmare. Position the lights, chose their type, their dynamics, even their texture! then when everything is ready, build the HDR environment, the directional light, the light mass, the light portals, the reflection boxes, the skylight if applicable and finally post-process the crap out of it with close to one hundred parameters.
Yikes!
Then you have to bake everything in, which takes 100% power of any CPU you’re using – explaining why I’ll be buying a Ryzen 3850X as soon as it comes out for its 16/32 cores/threads.

But hey! I can design absolutely lovely scenes already and when thinking about what Martouf’s shop will look kike, I can’t help but drooling!