SEAR DevBlog week of 6/23: Detours suck

Introducing the sexiest grey square I've ever created.

We have a new vehicle, Wasp, looking all sleek and awesome and nearly ready for importing, and usually I pick a new art asset like that for the post image, but you guys, you have no idea how awesome the grey square in this screencap is.

It took me forever and a day (read: the better part of my available project time over the last week and a half) to get this freaking square to display how it is. EXACTLY how it is. And I'm deeply pleased with myself for getting it right.

If you want the gory details I posted them out in the community Discord along with a little video of the grey box in action - because it doesn't just stay in that one spot, brazenly drawing over the Phase Map, oh no. It moves. And indeed, it is in the movement detail that the devil of this particular functionality resides.

The cool part is despite my deep irritation at not making any progress on the work that I had scheduled for this last week, I still learned a ton, expanded our function library with some handy vector manipulation tools, got grounded on the basics of camera manipulation (which will come in useful on some of the future tasks I have scheduled for myself, so I kind of just shuffled the order of work a bit), and got some very helpful refreshers on how 2D and 3D space translate, not to mention getting my hands dirty with translating from relative to world space and back again - a task I have, up until now, managed to avoid.

If I hadn't solved this problem by the end of the day today, not gonna lie, I'd be beyond frustrated and in desperate need of a weekend off. As it stands, I feel rejuvenated and basically like the smartest guy to ever walk the earth, so I plan on putting in a few extra hours this weekend to see if I can get anywhere near caught up on the other stuff I wanted to be doing.

Of course, the team was also cranking away this week. We got most of the aforementioned Wasp vehicle, more progress on bug identification, a little testing done on the new rough terrain we're adding to the landscape material, a texture mask and controller silhouette that we're going to use for the tutorial, and some very nice visual and design work on phase 5 (now being recast as the "lava cave"). Unfortunately we also had some illness running rampant, which cost us a little time on some other pieces, but them's the breaks.

Just as a bit of an aside: I also continued my personal evolution of figuring out exactly when ChatGPT can be relied upon, and when it can't. Which is to say, you can never rely on it, not really. But in my experience you especially can't rely on it for high-level direction questions. Like coding strategy, infrastructure, or approach. At least not for novel problems. All GPT knows is what it can find on the internet, and it's very useful for that, but I find its hallucinations kick into overdrive when it has to fill in the blanks. Like this: Me: Is there a node in UE5 blueprints that will give the screen coordinates of an object in worldspace?

GPT: Sure is, it's ProjectWorldToScreen

Me: what if the object is behind the camera instead of onscreen?

GPT: It will still work, you just have to clamp the X values.

Me: I just did that and the X screen coordinate is returning gibberish.

GPT: Of course it is, that is expected behavior. You just need to do XYZ.

Me: I tried XYZ and it didn't work.

GPT: Of course that didn't work, that's because of ABC. What you can do instead is MBS.

Me: I think I'm going to stop asking you such broad questions.

I'd say it's reliable for parsing Epic documentation and getting me a node name about 70% of the time, which is nice. And when I need to know the geometry math, like I have a specific question about how to translate a point from one position to another, calculate a direction vector, or something like that, reliability jumps to like 90%.

But it's not sentient, folks. It's not a friend or even a coworker. It is a glorified search engine that can reassemble the words it finds online in a way that is super convenient to read - and that's it. Use it wisely and for crying out loud, never trust it entirely. Everything's gotta be independently verified.