Hi! Here you’ll find info and developer diaries on my upcoming game
Grab n' Throw, Unreal Engine 4 -specific tips, fixes and implementations, posts on programming, IT and music, and various other writings.
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AngelScript Integration Tests
Posted on October 9, 2024
| 7 minutes
| 1311 words
| Ben Renninson
AngelScript is awesome. It’s a C#-like scripting language you can integrate into a C++ game engine, with wicked-fast hot-reloads, so wicked-fast iteration speed. The amazing Hazelight gamedev team integrated it into Unreal Engine and have made it open source. I wrote a longer post here that I’ll copy below.
One of its great features is exposing Unreal’s test automation framework and turning them into easy integration tests. This existing work was incredible.
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GOAP and Utility AI in Grab n' Throw
Why don't we have both?
Posted on May 4, 2024
| 4 minutes
| 833 words
| Ben Renninson
I’m working on a game where you throw stacks of your own team-mates in first-person, in various game-modes. I tried a few different approaches for player AI, but ended up settling on Utility for “what to do” and GOAP (Goal Oriented Action Programming) for “how to do it”. Each of these ( Utility AI and GOAP AI note) are worth watching videos on, they’re extremely cool.
Utility AI was popularised by Dave Mark, and was used in Guild Wars 2 (or an expansion).
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Monkey Island Painting #1
Posted on November 19, 2023
| 1 minutes
| 29 words
| Ben Renninson
I painted one of my favourite scenes from Curse of Monkey Island. Not a touch on the existing art style by Bill Tiller, but I had fun.
Bigger image
Azure Infrastructure as Code - 2 - Deploying the rest
Posted on May 3, 2023
| 8 minutes
| 1597 words
| Ben Renninson
1 - Intro 2 - Deploying the rest Deploying the rest of the platform landing zone Now that we’ve some code showing infrastructure changes and deploying, lets extend it to include the rest of the core ALZ resources.
You can follow along with the code in the repo. The below is written chronologically but you’ll be looking at the completed version of the code. It should still be understandable.
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Azure Infrastructure as Code - 1 - Intro
Posted on April 20, 2023
| 10 minutes
| 2120 words
| Ben Renninson
1 - Intro 2 - Deploying the rest Series Overview Say you’re an organisation who’s started their cloud journey, but hasn’t fully dove (doven? dove’st?) in. You’ve got some solid business reasons that mean you now need to lean into it. You know you want to do it properly - you want to move to Infrastructure as Code and set up a modern architecture that will grow with you.
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BGP on Windows Desktop
Posted on January 14, 2023
| 6 minutes
| 1083 words
| Ben Renninson
I love seeing BGP pushed to the edges of its intended use-case, and I’d been wanting to learn Go for a while. I’d also been frustrated that I couldn’t ingest BGP routes on my Windows desktop - it’s only included in the server OS versions. So I decided that my holiday project would be extending GoBGP to get my network’s BGP routes into my Windows 10 desktop’s routing table.
I’m also a huge fan of “Why not?
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Devlog - Jazz Hands
Posted on January 13, 2023
| 1 minutes
| 180 words
| Ben Renninson
Grab n' Throw has reached an important milestone - we now have hands!
With the core gameplay features in place it was time to add some GameJuice™. Over the last few months I’ve added visible hands, hand animations, camera animations and more. To make everything more immersive I’ve opted to re-use the same external player model that other players see - you can look down and see your feet, and your hands grab the actual character you’re holding.
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Python-automated lightweight BGP lab in GNS3
Posted on August 26, 2022
| 1 minutes
| 102 words
| Ben Renninson
I was looking to play around with some BGP changes so I set up a topology in GNS3 using FRR docker containers. Once I laid out the topology I didn’t want to manually address it, so I automated the entire lifecycle. Address generation, config application etc.
This ended up taking way longer than manually doing it but was also way more fun and is now much easier to reset!
BTW: FRR docker containers are incredible if you’re just looking to lab routing protocols.
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How to Rename a UE4 or UE5 C++ Class Used by Blueprints
Posted on April 19, 2022
| 1 minutes
| 192 words
| Ben Renninson
Commit all existing changes so you can cleanly roll back if required Stop the editor Add something like the following to <your game folder>\Config\DefaultEngine.ini, where: <ProjectName> is the official project name UE4 uses in C++ for your project. E.g. the GT in GT_API that shows at the top of class declarations <OldClassName> is the name of the class you’re renaming from, with no A, U etc prefix. E.g. GTPlayerState instead of AGTPlayerState <NewClassName> is the name of the class you’re renaming to, again with no A, U etc prefix.
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Compilers for programming while tired
Posted on February 11, 2022
| 1 minutes
| 164 words
| Ben Renninson
Strongly typed languages and compilers are wonderful. Especially when my eyes are struggling to stay open and the bed is calling.
Usually by this time of night I can’t complete a full task, but I can plan and start one. If I’m refactoring I might change the parameter type in one function. If I come back a few days later and didn’t note exactly where I got to, I press CTRL+B and the compiler will dutifully show all the calls I have left to change.
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