"After a brief search through the "Smart Object" code I'd written, ha ha, no, no no no, I can't store that thing at that place in the code because it clobbers the same thing we set in the code we copied this from, ha ha ha." - an excerpt from my bestseller "Copy-And-Paste Bit Me In The Butt Again!"

My SO code is working now, and before I perform more "efficiencies" on it, I am backing it up.

First there is a function
Then there is no function
Then there is

It was a mess, mostly due to debugging, and I'd spent some time cleaning up similar code, so I thought, "It's just like this other code, with a couple of minor tweaks."

There was a third minor tweak lurking in the bowels of the algorithms. A function had reappeared.

Snip snip. Working again. Saaaaavvvvveeee.

The smartest thing about a Smart Object is what you think of your own cleverness when you finally get a group of them to behave.

You just create a game actor with something like a door or a chair static mesh, with a handy target (with benefits) attached to it, the SmartObject, which an NPC can claim and then go to, and some code you add about whatever you want them to do there. Like, open that door, or sit on that chair, and so forth. You can get carried away. The claim-and-release feature prevents NPCs from converging on the same point at the same time.

I had to try them out with state machines. Yes. I am a glutton for punishment.

Smart Objects. Now, they are like putty in my mouse pointer.

Some old sayings don't translate all that well.

#UE5 #RPG #SmartObjects

I'm back to working in 5.6.1, but I'm going to check what differences there are between Smart Objects in 5.6 vs 5.7. It would seem like merging any 5.7 SO code changes into 5.6 code would be much easier than repairing what they did to the UI in 5.7.

Famous last words I am known for. It has to be easier this way...

It's apparently not just Linux. Some Windows programmers have run into very similar problems with crashes in code which did not crash in 5.6.

In Linux, 99% of crash errors seem Vulkan-related. If I had a manual describing what each command in DirectX was supposed to do, I'd write a clone for Linux from scratch, but we have Vulkan, which is very good, though we get synchronization weirdness in UE at times.

Maybe DirectX deliberately burns some cycles to keep everything in sync. Vulkan code in UE wants no part of this. It is written to slam everything to the screen as fast as it possibly can, which is great if we have no race conditions anywhere. The UI changes have introduced one, and the Vulkan interface is doing what it was written to do - go zoom.

#UE5 #SmartObjects #Vulkan

I'm yelling at Unreal Engine over them not exposing the location of smart objects BEFORE they are claimed. You can't pick the closest smart object using any exposed function in blueprints without first claiming that smart object. That's crazy, and results in really expensive code, if you need that functionality.

If you use FindSmartObjects, it returns an array without location information, and the standard use it to pick one at random. If you split the random result into its parts, neither contains location information. Each time it is called, it potentially sends the NPC to a different smart object. The NPC is cutting trees and returning partial loads. Now I've got an NPC bouncing between trees because of the random choice of smart objects.

If you use FindSmartObject (singular), it seems to return the same smart object each time, if a request is for the same area as the last one. Nice when cutting one tree. Useless when the tree (a smart object) has itself or its slot invalidated. The NPC never finds another tree, and will attempt to cut a stump, or wander around, depending on how you want to code the behavior tree.

Stop making me write work-arounds. This should be part of the smart object system - the location of the smart object, not just its slot - and that should be available before making a claim.

This came out in version 5. I'm using 5.6.1. The current 5.7 code looks like it does the same thing. I'd run 5.7, but they've coded that to give us disappearing windows in Linux, and I can't fight all of the wars right now.

#UE5 #RPG #SmartObjects

I wonder if I can claim the same claim handle again right after calling EndBehavior. If not, I must write some evil code to accomplish that by other means.

#UE5 #SmartObjects

"Nyx argues that the notion of requiring public housing residents to keep a hackable device that can become an audio eavesdropping tool in their apartment may represent the most disturbing application of the Halo 3C. “That kind of took it up a notch as far as how egregious this entire product line is,” Nyx says. “Most people have an expectation that their home isn’t bugged, right?”

As sensors like the Halo 3C proliferate across schools and even homes, Vasquez-Garcia says the biggest takeaway from his and Nyx’s findings ought to be that putting microphones and internet connections into every device in our lives as simple as a smoke detector is a decision that carries real risk. “If people remember one thing from this, it should be: Don’t blindly trust every internet of things device just because it claims to be for safety,” Vasquez-Garcia says. “The real issue is trust. The more we accept devices that say 'not recording' at face value, the more we normalize surveillance without really knowing what's inside or bothering to question it.”"

https://www.wired.com/story/school-bathroom-vape-detector-audio-bug/

#Cybersecurity #USA #Motorola #Surveillance #Privacy #Hacking #IoT #SmartObjects

"The FBI listed some indicators of compromise (IoCs) in the PSA for consumers to tell if they were impacted. But the average person isn’t running network detection infrastructure in their homes, and cannot hope to understand what IoCs can be used to determine if their devices generate “unexplained or suspicious Internet traffic.” Here, we will attempt to help give more comprehensive background information about these IoCs. If you find any of these on devices you own, then we encourage you to follow through by contacting the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) at www.ic3.gov.

The FBI lists these IoC:

- The presence of suspicious marketplaces where apps are downloaded.

- Requiring Google Play Protect settings to be disabled.

- Generic TV streaming devices advertised as unlocked or capable of accessing free content.

- IoT devices advertised from unrecognizable brands.

- Android devices that are not Play Protect certified.

- Unexplained or suspicious Internet traffic.

The following adds context to above, as well as some added IoCs we have seen from our research."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/fbi-warning-iot-devices-how-tell-if-you-are-impacted

#CyberSecurity #Privacy #IoT #SmartObjects #InternetOfThings

"[A] team of researchers recently set out to determine just how much companies like Amazon, Apple and Google are using the data gathered through their voice assistants to profile us –– track and monitor our behavior –– across the internet.
(...)
The study focused on the behaviors of the three biggest voice assistant platforms: Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant. What researchers found was that how concerned you should be about your smart assistant profiling you varies greatly depending on which device you use.

But in order to figure this out, they had to essentially trick voice assistants into profiling them.

They downloaded publicly available information that Google compiles on every user based on their searches, like gender, age range, relationship status and income bracket. Using those labels, they were able to design questions that could easily convince the platforms that they were, for example, married, had children or were a homeowner not a renter.

The researchers then recorded themselves asking these questions and replayed the audio to voice assistants over and over again. Over the course of 20 months, they conducted 1,171 experiments involving nearly 25,000 queries.
(...)
What they ended up finding was that Alexa exhibits the most straightforward kind of profiling behavior: It’s all based on your interest in products.
(...)
However, with Siri and Google Assistant, things are more complicated.

After reaching out to Apple to get their data, the company insisted “they had no data on us,” Choffnes says, “which means we couldn’t even test anything or prove any hypothesis about whether there was any profiling happening.”
(...)
Meanwhile, Google Assistant was the strangest of the bunch. The researchers found that it was clearly profiling its users but often incorrectly."
https://news.northeastern.edu/2025/03/17/voice-assistant-profiling-research/

#VoiceAssistants #IoT #SmartObjects #Amazon #Alexa #Google #Apple #Surveillance #Privacy #DataProtection

🚀 Exciting News for Developers! 🌟 The future of QR and NFC technology in the US is brighter than ever, thanks to platforms like ObjectVoice! 📱✨ As a software developer, I've seen firsthand the incredible progress we've made with ObjectVoice. This innovative platform empowers us to create smart behaviors using a simple no-code interface, harnessing the power of QR codes and NFC tags to make everyday objects intelligent.

#QRCode #NFCTechnology #ObjectVoice #SmartObjects #NoCode

#UserAgents #IoT #SmartObjects: "User agents can be well-designed or they can be poorly made. The fact that a user agent is designed to act in accord with your desires doesn't mean that it always will. A software agent, like a human agent, is not infallible.

However – and this is the key – if a user agent thwarts your desire due to a fault, that is fundamentally different from a user agent that thwarts your desires because it is designed to serve the interests of someone else, even when that is detrimental to your own interests.

A "faithless" user agent is utterly different from a "clumsy" user agent, and faithless user agents have become the norm. Indeed, as crude early internet clients progressed in sophistication, they grew increasingly treacherous. Most non-browser tools are designed for treachery.

A smart speaker or voice assistant routes all your requests through its manufacturer's servers and uses this to build a nonconsensual surveillance dossier on you. Smart speakers and voice assistants even secretly record your speech and route it to the manufacturer's subcontractors, whether or not you're explicitly interacting with them:"

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

Two bug-fixes this weekend on the ObjectVoice platform that I'm excited to share.
1. Previewing web pages inside the emulator for Forward behaviors is now *much* more dependable. Had a lot of work to get around that one.
2. The bug that was 'resetting' behaviors before publishing is fixed!

Hope everyone and their projects are doing great this weekend!

#startup #saas #softwareupdates #qr #smartobjects #entrepreneur