Serial Experiments Lain

C’est quoi ?

Serial Experiments Lain est un dessin animé japonais produit en 1998 par Yoshitoshi Abe et Ryutaro Nakamura.

Ce conte cyberpunk fait désormais partie des classiques du genre et possède une communauté grandissante de fans l’élevant au rang d’œuvre culte, c’est pourquoi j’ai voulu y jeter un œil.

Malheureusement, il y a deux choses que je ne puis garantir ici : la première, que j’ai bien compris l’œuvre, et la seconde, que cette critique sera libre de tout divulgâchage (spoilers !), car je devrai mentionner certains moments de l’intrigue pour les analyser, bien que j’essaierai de les garder au minimum.

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Unreal Engine Tips – Engine Migration troubleshooting

While working on the game Front Line Zero with the METATEK game developement studio, I’ve used the Unreal Engine 4 game engine for some years now.

I’d like to share some knowledge about the pitfalls and neat tricks I got to discover under the form of short, easily-readable blog posts.

Today’s topic : some tips on how to migrate a project from an older version of the engine to a newer one (and what were the encountered issues).

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Unreal Engine Tips – Understanding svn+ssh, then not using it

While working on the game Front Line Zero with the METATEK game developement studio, I’ve used the Unreal Engine 4 game engine for some years now.

I’d like to share some knowledge about the pitfalls and neat tricks I got to discover under the form of short, easily-readable blog posts.

Today’s topic : how to integrate SVN over SSH in an Unreal Engine 4 project, and ultimately why we walked away from SSH.

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How to make your own Resharper C++ file template

ReSharper is an extension for Visual Studio that provides a lot of quality-of-life improvements over the initial VS user experience. It was initially made for C# (hence the name), but also exists in C++ ! If you never used it, but know competing products like VAX (Visual Assist X) for example, you basically know what ReSharper is.

It happens pretty often that, working on a C++ project, I want to make a new class (separated in two files : a header file and a source file) based on a kind of template, like they should all follow the same basic structure, have the same copyright disclaimers at the beginning, then start implementation surrounded in a specific namespace, etc…

Visual Studio in itself is pretty limited in that respect. And to be honest it’s very possible to just copy-paste existing files and make the necessary arrangements each time, but it becomes kind of tedious and boring over time. Turns out, ReSharper happens to know how to do this kind of thing : behold the ReSharper File Templates ! Unfortunately, it’s pretty complicated to use at first and documentation is scarce (at the time I’m writing this).

So here’s a quick guide on how to do it. It assumes you have ReSharper up and running (for brevity, I skip the part about installing it).

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Coercing Assimp into reading OBJ PBR materials

Edit January, 4th 2022 : The Assimp maintainers merged just a few days ago a pull request that enables PBR support by Assimp’s OBJ importer. If you are able to use a recent version of Assimp, I would advise you to go get it and work with it the way Assimp expects it. See the pull request here.

These days, I’m trying to import 3D models exported as Wavefront OBJ files in my Vulkan renderer. In order to achieve that effortlessly (kinda), I’m using the very good Assimp (pun not intended) library.

It kinda works well if you stick to a « traditional Blinn-Phong » lighting pipeline (also known as « prehistoric lighting » 😉 ), with ambient/diffuse/specular components and so on. Everything is there. Things become trickier if you try to bring PBR into the mix, with roughness, metallic and ambient occlusion maps for example.

What parameters should you use in Assimp to read those values ? What texture type should be used in order to import those maps ? Turns out it’s not as easy as one would think, because support on both the Wavefront OBJ specification and Assimp is just not there.

So I had to cheat a little, let me explain how !

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Unreal Engine Tips – Bake a Material to Render Target

While working on the game Front Line Zero with the METATEK game developement studio, I’ve used the Unreal Engine 4 game engine for some years now.

I’d like to share some knowledge about the pitfalls and neat tricks I got to discover under the form of short, easily-readable blog posts.

Today’s topic : how to create an utility that draws the result of a material into a render target asset in the Unreal editor.

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How to run shell files FROM WITHin visual studio

I had a problem recently : my scripting experience coming mostly from Linux, I’m much more used to shell scripts than .bat scripts. And despite working on Windows, I still prefer using shell script language mostly for human factors reasons (I find batch syntax ugly and frankly impossible to understand and/or remember).

But contrary to the Linux world, a shell executable (also known as sh.exe, or any other flavor like Bash or Zsh to name a few) is not installed by default on a Windows. You have to install it yourself and do a bunch of wiring so that shell files are automatically executed by the shell executable using some kind of fake Unix environment (Cygwin is a good example).

My problem of the day is one of yet another kind…

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UNREAL ENGINE TIPS – C++ BITFLAGS ENUMS

While working on the game Front Line Zero with the METATEK game developement studio, I’ve used the Unreal Engine 4 game engine for some years now.

I’d like to share some knowledge about the pitfalls and neat tricks I got to discover under the form of short, easily-readable blog posts.

Today’s topic : how to make a C++ enum that displays as an editable bit flags value in the editor.

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Unreal Engine Tips – Playing random animations

While working on the game Front Line Zero with the METATEK game developement studio, I’ve used the Unreal Engine 4 game engine for some years now.

I’d like to share some knowledge about the pitfalls and neat tricks I got to discover under the form of short, easily-readable blog posts.

Today’s topic : how to play a random animation from a predefined list.

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