UE4 - list blueprint assets by type

I'm busy working on a project in unreal lately, and ran into the desire to enumerate a list of blueprint assets from a folder. This post has a simple solution.

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game engines: using ALL the languages

In the 1.0/long term version of my engine, I designed the core runtime to expose it's API in such a way that it would be agnostic to a scripting language. This is a short post on how that looks, when you connect the dots.

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OBJ parser: easy parse time triangulation

For some reason whenever I wrote a quick obj parser, I never bothered to think about the case where the faces in the file had more than 3 points. It was easier in the moment to just triangulate the meshes before loading them in the 3D app. In practice on

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c++11 constexpr fnv1a compile time hash

I've been working with some c++ lately and had previously been using static hash values for strings (similar to this from the Bitsquid blog) but the one thing that bothered me was the lack of ability to use them in switch statements, where I often want to use them. With constexpr in c++11, I can.

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haxe: compile time macros

Haxe is a really great language for me. It does cross platform in a sensible way - by compiling and generating code to a target language. The best part is that it's not just converting, it's properly compiling the code - so all errors are caught by the compiler itself long before the generated code even gets there.

One of its most powerful features is the macro system which allows you to run haxe code at compile time, to augment and empower your existing haxe code. It sounds crazy - so let's dig in.

haxe.org

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Shaders : second stage

The second part in a series on understanding shaders, covering how data gets sent between shaders and your app, how shaders are created and more.

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Primer : Shaders

A common theme I run into when talking to some developers is that they wish they could wrap their head around shaders. Shaders always seem to solve a lot of problems, and often are referenced as to the solution to the task at hand.

But just as often they are seen as a sort of enigma or black box - one that is so shrouded in complexity that it makes learning them from ”basic” examples near impossible.

Hopefully, this primer will help those that aren't well versed and help transition into using shaders, where applicable.

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