Programming

Yak Shaving

Posted on March 8, 2025 | 1 minutes | 150 words | Ben Renninson

“This will be a nice quick one to implement,” I tell myself. This week, I Was implementing AI for Inventor Simulator Needed the AI to select shelves to look at Was implementing a look-up-table of item->shelves-holding-item to make it faster Wrapped the shelves array in another struct because you can’t directly nest TSets and TArrays in Unreal Engine Added Unreal-Angelscript functionality to use AS-defined Hash functions of custom structs in the engine/UPROPERTYs Tested in a shipping/JIT build before making the PR Fixed my existing JIT issues causing the build to fail Implemented a generic map comparison I love game development. [Read More]

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. [Read More]

Unreal Engine programming AngelScript

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). [Read More]

Unreal Engine programming AI

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? [Read More]

Programming Networking Golang BGP Windows 10

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. [Read More]

Programming Networking

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. [Read More]

Programming