Megan Fox

Been a minute, so lemme show you my hordes

Sorry for the lack of updates, I've been head down in intense C++ coding land doing, well. THIS. Getting this to work took an absurd number of incremental steps, some of which I'll probably do blog...

Three ways of doing hitstop (which adds weight to hits)

Right, so, hitstop! Lemme just start by showing you what I mean.

This video has hitstop: 2025-03-29 19:52:46 +0000 UTC View Post

Fake Gravity 2.0

So, previously I did a post about Metroid Prime style fake gravity. Basically, to get the best of both worlds of thumpy heavy gravity and good air control during platforming, you adjust the player'...

Ah, holidays are over, time to blog again

Hiya again! Did that flurry of posts n stuff, then descended into holiday fog, but new year, new "oh hey right I should be blogging!" so yep. I'll catch back up on stuff. Happy new year y'all!

Did you know you can copy Unreal Graph, edit it, then paste it?

Right, so you probably know you can copy-paste Unreal graph stuff - Blueprints, Materials, ControlRig, etc - but have you ever tried pasting it somewhere that wasn't Unreal?

Go on! Try it! Lo...

How to use skeletally-mismatched animations in Unreal

(yet another bonus blog cus it came up in email)

This becomes relevant if you ever want to use the Manny anims with a different skelly, or similar cases where you grab an asset pack on the ma...

How to share animations across skeletons in UE5

(bonus blog time! because this came up in an email so I figured OMG THIS ISN'T COMMON KNOWLEDGE BUT IS SUPER IMPORTANT, so here we go!)

Right, so, first! Unreal's skeletal retargeting is INCR...

Reducing sound pileups

So you've got a giant pile of smashables for. Well. Let's be honest this is probably a bad idea. And yet, this scene exists in a ton of games.

2024-09-20 21:08:37 +0000 UTC View Post

(poll) Which of these things interests folks more?

So! I've kinda dug deep on a couple of things lately, and I'm also migrating old code over from old project to new- which means I'm doing a lot of "oh god why did past-me do it that way" and refini...

One optimal way of driving UMG (Unreal UI)

So you're a Unity developer switching to Unreal. You hop into this new UI system called "UMG", and at first glance, it seems alright? So you go to make your 9-slice window image base so you can beg...

Teensy update

Was hoping to have a post about UMG / Unreal UI up by now, but I'm still neck deep in it heh. Still though! Soon. I spent the last while walking through a sea of rakes, trying to figure out how the...

How I make color palettes (part 2 of 2)

When last we left our daring colors, they were here:

2024-06-03 18:48:52 +0000 UTC View Post

How I make color palettes (part 1 of 2)

Lately the work I've been doing is more branding adjacent, and I realized: maybe this would also help folks? So here!

Programmers, artistically dense friends, I was once like you. Or rather, ...

On Combat Tracing, and Overcomplication

So I've got this fancy swept pill tracing system, right? It's a whole thing. Spent probably months refin...

Switch Systems 201

I did a post on Switch systems waaay back in 2017: https://www.patreon.com/posts/switch-systems-11462060 2024-02-29 18:51:09 +0000 UTC View Post

Getting a sense of weight WITHOUT impacting platforming

You've all had the usual debate, I'm sure, when it comes to setting gravity. You're looking at the behavior of the world as you increase gravity, and hey things fall better, it's nice! But then go ...

How that SuggestProjectileVelocityFromPeakHeight works

You might have seen that node and gone "huh", and yeah! It's something I adapted from a friend's math library. I don't claim credit for the logic at the core here, most of what I did is move stuff ...

Making an Unreal navlink that can make NPCs jump gaps

This isn't even just making NPCs jump. This is the tech you need for making NPCs use ladders, or do power teleports across gaps, or any navmesh-ignoring point to point traversal verb you can think ...

Moving the CharacterMovementComponent procedurally, without root motion

Right, so, let's set the stage: you're doing a sword swing animation, and we want it to feel like a concise movement instead of a button mash you hit while randomly moving around. To pull that off,...

Gotchas with Unreal's Fracture system

I hit a bunch of issues with this initially, so thought I'd run folks through the process, and a couple of hurdles I hit.

1.) Don't start with a big whole-mesh shatter

...

Don't be afraid of macros

For ages, I avoided using Blueprint macros. Theoretically they can shatter in some obscure cases but, seriously, you should use them more often. They can save you a ton of time. Like this thing! It...

"Select" nodes are for everything. EVERYTHING.

I'm back a post, and this made me giggle, so thought I'd share it. Here's how to make a macro that spits out a randomized trans flag color. Note the stacked select, which biases correctly (trans fl...

A bit more on AnimNotifyStates

I casually mentioned how these are the hub of the "attack-defining Montage that does all the things" approach in that last post, but I wanted to talk specifically about the two ways you can do this...

The C++ code for AnimNotifyState access

This is just the C++ you need for for that AnimNotifyState conversion thing. Super simple, but here, saves you a few minutes

Using Montages as all-in-one attack definitions

This isn't so much a dense piece of code as, a way of thinking of existing systems to make them do more than you might expect.

In this spirit, let us consider the humble AnimNotify. Easily mi...

The right way to attach a mesh to a socket in Unreal

This is another of those things that was super frustrating to google, with a ton of bad answers, and it's possibly because of a UI bug! I'm leaving this public as a result, so maybe a good answer w...

This is how, in Unreal, to tell if a pawn is local or not

I'm a bit behind on posts, so I'm just kicking this one out now, because I spent a very angry couple of hours and found no good explanations. Took a friendly person on a Discord.

Anyways, thi...

Health/Damage Swept Pill Tracing

EDIT: Make sure you also read my later realization about this system, heh

You maybe saw that trac...

Health/Damage/Death handling in Unreal

There are a bunch of ways of going about damage systems in Unreal, but the first key takeaway here is that: Unreal doesn't exactly provide a health or damage system. They give you functions, that a...

Looping animations with non-looping in/out anims

(this would be the March code post a few days late, sorry about that! GDC and the halo around it kind ate time, heh)

Imagine you want to animate a bird unfurling their wings, flapping them or...