What if the stars were just a giant wallpaper? A random thought came to mind that a ship might be traveling towards the edge of space only to hit a wall, which begins to crack...

Just found out the #AI in Age of Empires was one of few designed to outsmart players rather than cheat.  Explains why I thought that was the norm, since I grew up on making mods for AOM/AOE3 (before creating @TechTraderAI to play the stock market).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Empires#Artificial_intelligence @dcpottinger

Another article here also touches on how AIs that do cheat badly painted the video game industry as not a serious area for AI in general: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131974/game_ai_the_state_of_the_.php?page=3

I've routinely gotten weird looks whenever I say that the kind of AI I'm interested to do are like those in video games or that that is my primary influence for how I want to approach AI, but it makes more sense now where some of my influences came from.
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Nothing Lasts Forever by Benjamin Walfisch (@benwallfisch)

Kagerou Project on Guitar Cover by Osamuraisan (@niconicosamurai)

Vocaloid Piano Covers by tjpiano (@tojio_)

Million Medley by marasy8 (@marasy8)

Drifting by Kristen Personius

The Love of a Dunmer by Bosa (@JonBabbLiberty)

Jet Set Radio Future OST by Hideki Naganuma (@Hideki_Naganuma)

Yorushika Piano Full Medley arranged by Polalice Alvireo (@PolaliceAlvireo)

With #Halloween coming up, this is an old but amusing read to consider we might be committing mass genocide on spirits and ghosts. #ghosts #ghostawareness #ghostgenocide
https://www.pftq.com/blabberbox/?page=God---s_Flashlight
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1. Kid watches people fly on TV. Parent: "Humans can't actually fly. Our bodies are too heavy. It's just a myth."
2. 1000 yrs later... Extremely fat kid watches people run on TV. Parent: "Humans can't actually run. Our bodies are too heavy. It's just a myth."
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Just a random idea for a comic that came to mind.
(but I do secretly believe we used to be able to fly)

Another mystery/horror story that came as a dream (and somewhat terrifying one at that)...

A group of friends are traveling to a new city and staying there for a bit. It is a tropical beach city - a sandy, walkable, small town with low-rise, shack-like residences.  They play video games as a team online the first night and joke about why they bother to name the group if they can't beat anyone yet.  After midnight, they order food delivered on GrubHub, since it's too late to go out and fall asleep after eating.

The next morning, a waitress from a nearby restaurant comes over with a plate of lobsters, but they didn't order anything.  The waitress says she has one of their credit cards, name, billing address and all.  The charge came from last night.  One of them suggest credit card fraud, but the waitress says the order was made in person. The friends point out they didn't even go anywhere last night, that they ordered food delivered.  One...[More]

General notes and things I wish I knew as I delved deeper into #UE4:
- Package build by default includes unused assets, which can bloat the size of your game.  Go to Project Settings -> Packaging -> List of Maps to package only assets referenced by that map.  To be more aggressive and reduce unused assets in general (or to keep smaller backups), right-click your map and Migrate to a new project to create a new folder with only the assets used in your game.  More tips on this here.  But don't mark your game as shipping or distribution until you want to disable loading of listening servers by command line / shortcut.
- Do not use numbers in the project folder name.  Otherwise builds will fail to run.
- Do not use Duplicate, as it moves the object slightly.  Use copy+paste.
- Never use AND boolean functions.  They will calculate every condition even if the first one is already false.  Use multiple branch nodes instead.  See Blueprint Scripting Has No Short-Circuit Evaluation.
- Never rename...[More]

Sims 3 Generations Build Mode OST by Steve Jablonsky (@jablonsky_steve)

In case anyone finds it useful, this is the code I use to automatically detect US holidays.  I don't claim credit for it - added bits and pieces over the years from various sources until it was complete enough that I didn't have to worry about it anymore.

[code]
        public bool isHoliday(DateTime date)
        {
    ...[More]

Getting a Black Screen Trying to Login After a Remote Desktop Session

I recently started on occasion having a black screen come up when logging in.  This happens if I previously signed into Windows remotely.  The mouse is gone, keyboard does not work, etc.  It turns out this is caused by Nvidia's GeForce Experience ShadowPlay.  Disabling Shadowplay stops this from happening.

More details here:
https://superuser.com/questions/1026423/windows-10-black-screen-after-local-login-and-previous-remote-desktop-session

For those still using SMF1, PHP5 or later will throw a lot of deprecated errors and warnings, which quickly clog the error log.  This thread below isolates the 3 changes you need to clear them:
https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=534915.0

To stop error logging internally to SMF:

To stop errors showing on the page itself:

"Game module could not be loaded. There may be an operating system error or the module may not be properly set up."

After reinstalling Unreal Engine, my project stopped loading up. The above error message was extremely unhelpful, especially as any search for it online referred to moving DLLs around which had nothing to do with my issue. It turns out what was missing was the exact version of Visual Studio that I had when I last worked on my project. It has to be the exact version with the extras for C++ game development included. Any newer or older version still returns the same error. In my case, it was Visual Studio 2019 paired with Unreal Engine 4.23.1; it took me a few reinstalls just to figure that out because the help docs point you instead to Visual Studio 2017.
This is more a reminder for myself in the future to avoid losing a day to this again, but maybe it helps save someone else the time as well.

Below is a blog describing a great fix for the excessive CPU usage Chrome has with multiple tabs open.  Specifically the Suspender extensions will stop any tab not in the foreground from continuing to use up CPU.
https://www.socmedsean.com/butchering-the-google-chrome-cpu-hog/

Despite having a quad-core CPU, Chrome somehow still uses up 100% of my resources especially if any tabs open are Google Drive / Sheets.