“Stephen Harper on Poilievre, Trump and ‘Far Left’ Liberals”: more evidence that the Conservative party is the worst. At least Harper is an asshole with ideas. Poilievre is an asshole whose one line is “oppose whatever the Liberals do”.
The Stochastic Game
Ramblings of General Geekery
Double mail call! These are the Kingdoms of Kanday and Chybisa for Harnworld, a system-agnostic early-medieval fantasy setting. You can read my review of the main Harnworld book if you’re curious.
“B.C. premier hints at ban on export of rare minerals to U.S. over Trump tariff threats”
Good! More of this, please.
If you’re confused about who’s in line to replace Trudeau at the head of the Liberals, here’s a summary. I can’t say I’m rooting for any of these people, but Freeland, Gould, and Wilkinson look like decent choices.
One of my birthday gifts this year was a Bitmap Brothers t-shirt! I’m so happy to be able to wear this. They are one of my top 3 favourite game developers ever.
Gotta love the double-speak of the Conservative party here, acting like the new tax rules on capital gains take money from the humble middle class when (checks notes) it applies to gains over $250,000 for individuals, and to corporations and trusts.
The January chocolate delivery has arrived! These are all new chocolate makers I have never heard about before, and all bars are a comfortable 70%! This is exciting.
The Kalikos Expedition, a yearly Lunar mission to fight the gods of winter in order to maintain a mild weather across the Imperial Heartlands… a drawing by me for The Winter King! #Glorantha #TTRPG
For those of you wondering about the good fluffy boy, he’s still good, and still fluffy as of this morning!
UE5 Gameplay Cameras: Developer Diary
Since early 2024 I have been partially working on a new project at Epic Games: a “proper” camera system1 for the Unreal Engine, so that anybody can make cool-looking cameras for their games! It came out with UE 5.5 a couple of months ago, albeit in a firmly “Experimental” role, and is somewhat unimaginatively named “Gameplay Cameras”. As I’m working on many improvements and additions for UE 5.6, I figured I would start a developer diary to let anybody interested in cameras know what’s up!
But first, here’s a little trailer video I made, using the Game Animation Sample Project, to hopefully whet your appetite:
About two-thirds of what you see in the video is available in UE 5.5, although the UI and workflow may look different as I improve, fix, and polish things up for UE 5.6. You can find it all under the “Gameplay Cameras” plugin, and there’s even a little bit of documentation on it, even though we usually don’t provide documentation for “Experimental” plugins. Of course, I’ll go into more details into future articles. Just be aware that the version in UE 5.5 is an early look with non-final workflows, missing features, and various limitations that make it, well, “Experimental”, and therefore unsuitable for production.
So far I’ve been working for about a year on this, but as I’m still also working on Sequencer, what you can see in Github at the time I’m writing this article represents maybe six months of that, minus holidays and the like. I’ll continue working part-time between cameras and cinematics for the foreseeable future. If you have questions or feedback about Gameplay Cameras, I’d love to hear it, and my contact information isn’t hard to find… I just won’t guarantee a timely reply! That’s what UDN is for.
If you want to follow along with the next articles in this developer diary, but you don’t want to read any of the other nonsense from my blog, you can limit yourself to the Unreal Engine category of posts.
My new year’s resolution, so to speak, is to try and post developer diary updates for Gameplay Cameras here about once a week. But as someone cleverly said: “this isn’t a promise to you… this is a promise to me“. See you next week! Maybe!
- Of course there are “proper” camera systems out there, but the Unreal Engine never shipped with one out of the box. ↩︎