iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

I've posted my first MinerMancers dev log! Finally! 😄 Do let me know what you'd like to hear about next, if you have a preference. If a particular subject gets more requests I'll be sure to prioritise it. Hope you enjoy! youtu.be/-wdz4vMpIzA

youtu.be

MinerMancers DevLog 1

YouTube video by Steve Streeting

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

MinerMancers is live on Steam! store.steampowered.com/app/3223050/... It's a game about silly wizards going mining together. Delve alone or with friends to satisfy your employer's demand for magical resources. This is a labour of love by my wife & I; there's a ways to go, but we're doing it 😄

store.steampowered.com

MinerMancers on Steam

MinerMancers is a co-op action game about under-appreciated wizards going mining together. You and up to 3 friends will cast spells, mine resources, fight monsters, and above all get back alive so you...

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

Switched to an AGX tonemapper for MinerMancers, and I really like how it retains the vibrancy of the colours much better than ACES did, especially when bright. It’s much closer to how HDR looked before, to the extent that I’ll probably drop the HDR path now since it was fiddly anyway

Screenshot of a pink wizard in a top-down cave, with veins of bright crystal

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

Object scattering system is starting to make open areas in MinerMancers levels feel a little more interesting 🧙‍♂️⛏️ #screenshotsaturday

A pink wizard in some sandy caves, surrounded by coral like decorations

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

WIP decorative ground object growth system for MinerMancers. Kind of an L-System, everything grows out of a single point

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

New lobber enemy (I affectionately refer to them as my lobby boys) making poison clouds and hiding behind things, annoyingly

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 05/11/2025

Explosions can now destroy diggable areas. Now we're mining!💥⛏️

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

Minermancers spell work this week: physics objects and AOEs! Here’s a bouncing explosive barrel spell that’s fun to play with Getting client prediction and smooth replication working on physics objects was fiddly but it works now.

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 25/10/2025

Minermancers progress this week: spray-style spells. Multiplayer predicted, and the underlying damage shapes are properly simulated to match the particle effects

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

SUDS Pro is on sale! It's my #unrealengine dialogue plugin that lets you use text files to write dialogue, direct camera cuts, character animation and more. If you prefer writing dialogue like a script, I think this is a nice way to do it. Reposts appreciated! www.fab.com/listings/3e3...

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

Switched our lobby level back to static lighting today. Old skool tweaking lightmap resolutions. I regret nothing, it's all we need and it runs like butter

Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

Quietly allowing people to assume you use LLM chatbots as well so they stop fecking talking at you about it

Wesley Crusher and friend wearing fake headsets in ST:TNG “The Game” while his Mum looks on in the background looking thrilled

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

I'm not planning to have damage numbers popping out of enemies, but it's very useful to be able to see damage values in testing. I had too much fun making these. Maybe I might use it in a practice range area in the real game at least Video: mastodon.gamedev.place/@sinbad/1152…

Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

Spending all day in this view making very careful changes so I don't break any of the multiplayer replication & prediction systems, as I chop up the spell system and re-assemble it. All appears to be working again now but 😖I hate multiplayer code

3 UE windows in a test level with 3 different coloured wizards in a triangle

Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

You thought bureaucracy was bad? Enter "vibe working" in Office 365! Try getting any sense at all out of the corporate world now everyone's had their brains cooked by delegating 90% of cognitive functions to a statistically biased bingo machine

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

What my chair actually looks like vs what my cats think it is This afternoon Merry was defeated in single combat by my chair while I was trying to do the hoovering

A red HÅG Capisco saddle chair. It has the signature horizontal T shaped back/arm rests

A young Bruce Lee using a Wing Chung practice dummy

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

I use honey instead of sugar in my bread these days, and having to rescue the last remnants of solidifying honey from the bottom of the bottle with heat and water has made my routinely eyeballed measurements even vaguer than usual.

12 bread rolls cooling on a rack. They’re very reddish brown

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How very dare games I want to play come out of early access and remove my excuse for why they're not technically adding to my backlog 😭

Got my electric cargo bike properly serviced today. I guess I should probably learn how to do what they did myself - I can do simple things but it's more complex than my old push bike used to be (e.g. actual brake fluid!) and I haven't really found the time

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The beta of GOLD TEETH has a great hook #ttrpg

Man the jibber beams and loose the fore-berks! It's time to set sail.
The course ahead may be treacherous, but by following the navigation
aids in this section—perhaps while reading bits to each other aloud—
you'll soon be in open ocean with a fine wind in your sails.
Welcome to the Punchbowl
The year is 1781. Oceans are battlefields. And battlefields are
rich pickings for the likes of you.
Nowhere is this more true than the Punchbowl of the
Antilles—a tropical archipelago brutalised by colonial powers
and further cursed by the detonation of an occult weapon one
year past.
It is now a vast lagoon—500 miles across and 50 ft below the
level the Atlantic ocean, which is held at bay by some magical
force, forming an encircling wall of seawater.
No one can get out. And only the most desperate and dangerous
people can get in.
People such as yourselves. Each of you a pirate, a criminal
or a scoundrel—each of you already befouled by magical
contamination—each of you almost beyond saving. It is why
you have been commissioned by King George III himself to
go beyond the water wall on a desperate mission to reclaim
the weapon that wrought such devastation there, and trouble
England's enemies all the while.
But this is subterfuge! You are no friend of England! In fact,
you have another agenda entirely. An agenda which is your
only chance at redemption: your only chance to survive the
pirate curse which will claim your soul.

GitScripts by KyUCOMRADE · Pull Request #3 · sinbad/GitScripts

This PR spam seems too dumb even for AI - it just changes my name to theirs and adds some whitespace. Suspect just a kid trying to get a PR approved for a school assignment or something. Blocked anyway, they have to learn github.com/sinbad/GitScripts/pull/3

github.com

Important git scripts on Git LFS

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

Uuum, sure but that's not really my fault, is it? This is your default install location, maybe you should shorten *your* paths 🙄🤣 #unrealengine

$Installing the UE 5.7 Preview in the default C:\Program Files\Epic Games folder causes it to throw an error "Files within the installation folder would exceed t he maximum path length of 250 characters. Please shorten the path"$

Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

I always knew gamers who cry “just add multiplayer, it should only take a couple of months” were idiots but JFC, the experience of making a game where multiplayer was in scope from the start really underlines what absolute bellendery that is

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

I baked my first apple pie of the year since our tree is ready. Left it to cool on the unit while we ate dinner, with a net cover over it.

Mugshot of the suspect
A black and white cat playing with a kickaroo on the floor

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

I wasn’t expecting much from Skate but I thought I’d at least try it. It spent ages to start up (anti cheat), then completely locked up my PC (likely also anti-cheat since regular software can’t do that and my drivers have been stable for months). Absolutely feck that nonsense. In the bin you go

Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

CW: Foundation S3 minor spoilers Really enjoying Lee Pace once again in Foundation S3, managing to bring yet another version of the character to the table. Instead of Dawn, Day and Dusk this time they have Dawn, Dude and Dusk 😄

Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

Some days you get to work on cool looking stuff. Other days you’re just debugging ownership chains looking for the broken link that’s causing an actor to not get unloaded at the right time 😑

Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

Mini UE tip: need an aiming direction in a 3rd-person game? Simple, right? No. There are 3 to choose from: 1. Actor direction (where the character is facing) 2. Camera direction (where the camera is facing) 3. Controller direction (where the player WANTS to face)

Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

Literally every time I flip a couple of switches in succession in our slightly echoey kitchen, my brain assumes it’s the intro to Fools Gold by the Stone Roses and starts playing the rest youtu.be/NSD11dnphg0?si=c4rKeYBZ8pL…

youtu.be

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

Me: puts books sideways and on top of a bookshelf because of lack of space Also me: still has stuff like this on another shelf for some reason. I don’t even use a Mac anymore

A shelf with 2 copies of Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Mac, Office for Mac and Windows 7 Professional

Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

Finally got around to clearing my last blocker for updating to UE 5.6 - my Runtime Virtual Texture based map system stopped working entirely. Turns out they added a new member to FPrimitiveSceneProxy that I only found by diffing the source 🙄

As of UE 5.6 the FPrimitiveSceneProxy class added a new property bSupportsRuntimeVirtualTexture which needs to be set in order for your procedural mesh to render into an RVT. Add this to the constructor to fix that:

#if ENGINE_MINOR_VERSION >= 6
// UE 5.6 added this, required for rendering to RVT
bSupportsRuntimeVirtualTexture = true;
#endif

Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 14/09/2025

I find it hilarious that Apple thinks I want a phone with maximum surface area and minimum thickness. The thing that goes in my pocket. In case it’s not obvious my pocket has finite WxH, and has a tendency to apply bend force. How is this fit for purpose

Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

My headstone will read "I bet this behaves differently in multiplayer"

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

Ahhhh I just figured out how to get a more traditional timeline sequence view of frame timings in Superluminal: you just re-sort the instance table on the left, which defaults to Duration descending, which is why the worst offenders are at the top.

Superluminal function statistics view for UWorld::Tick sorted by Start Time ascending instead of the default Duration descending

Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

I was just sharing my newfound love of Superluminal with someone and I noticed the tagline "From installation to first fix in less than 10 minutes." on the website. It was 100% true in my case! Marketing copy that's actually true? Unheard of 😜

Superluminal website tagline "From installation to first fix in less than 10 minutes."

Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 09/09/2025

I was having real problems tracking down a periodic drop in performance using Unreal Insights, I was missing a STAT declaration where it was happening and it was just being subsumed into "FTimerManager::Tick". Figured it was a good time to try Superluminal.

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

I can totally see why middle managers think LLMs improve productivity, they also hover around more productive people spouting vaguely plausible nonsense and think they’re adding value

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

Without wanting to jinx it, it’s been 2 weeks since I swapped the PSU on my wife’s work PC and it seems to have gotten a lot more stable since. Perhaps my hunch* was correct *after ruling out a ton of other things like memory timing, bad drivers, overheating etc

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

I wrote up how I implemented navmesh generation through solid but destructible geometry in our game, something I could find very little written about (that didn't suggest a worse solution). #unrealengine #gamedev

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

There's been a lot of negative talk lately about "the UE look", which I don't really agree with, but I can see some aspects of. But at least I can say with some confidence that we don't really have that look. Probably because we've turned off so much we're basically using UE4 with better tooling

Minermancers screenshot: four silly wizards in a mine from above

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Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

My next job is to try to get NPCs to path find through diggable geometry as a last resort. This is trickier than I thought, navmesh modifiers can only really make *open* areas more costly, not make areas blocked with colliders navigable at high cost 🤔

Steve Streeting @sinbad3d.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

Amazing what a little roughness map tweaking can do for the punchiness of surfaces (Marie did the actual work, not me) [Our hero materials use a packed AORMH map where R=AO, G=Roughness, B=Metallic, A=Height, authored in Substance]

Picture of a stony surface, the edges of some of the stones catch the light because of the roughness map