#unreal spooky story time! I just figured out a bonkers problem which goes like this:

1. A UPROPERTY which was initialised in a C++ constructor was becoming NULL by the time BeginPlay() was called
2. It only happened in Blueprints that had been duplicated from other blueprints. Creating a *identical* blueprint from scratch was fine
3. The blueprints had NO CODE in them

Wanna know why? The answer is actually quite simple, and maybe you already know. But it drove me insane for a good hour.

NVK live blogging? Why not!

Last week I was investigating a GPU crash with the OpenGL CTS on Zink+NVK. In particular, this test:

KHR-GL46.tessellation_shader.tessellation_control_to_tessellation_evaluation.gl_tessLevel

Upon first inspection, this test has some of the stupid simplest shaders ever. Why the hell was the hardware throwing an Out of Range Address exception?!?

#cpp question: What are the alignment requirements for memory passed to placement new?

My understanding was that it only needed to be aligned to alignof(T), where T is the type being constructed.

But we have a release build crash due to MSVC assuming it is 16-byte aligned and initializing memory using `movaps`.

I acquired (with help) a killer audio cassette digitizing rig, and then IMMEDIATELY had to spend over 2 months digitizing 90+ cassettes from the 1999 Game Developers Conference (via a slow-and-steady workflow that got the job done without being too disruptive to any other work I was doing).

So, here we are, it's done. Go enjoy 70+ hours of presentations about all aspects of game making and producing, in 1999.

https://archive.org/details/1999_Game_Developers_Conference_Audio

People ask me how to learn game design. 😬

Don't know what to say.

"Well, I was wildly incompetent for the first decade. Wasted a lot of time and money."

"Oh, and then in the next decade, I got a little better and was cocky. But still didn't know anything. Wasted even more time and money."

"Now I'm slightly better. Stuff doesn't instantly fall over as often. But still figure I've got another decade before I know what I'm doing."