Erebus Weekly - Week 042 - 01.07.2018
H-hello? Is anybody in here? I think I left a burner on... Right, week 042. Hey, at least it hasn't been a year. We've been a bit busy to say the least, with not a whole lot to show for it. Not in a format easily translatable through the screen, so far. Alas, things have indeed happened. Read on; you waited this long, right?
Knew Knowledge
Yeah no, that's not a typo. Snarkiness aside, just within the last 4 days I've dipped into Jekyll/Liquid and Kickster. Throw a dash of ZeroNet on top of that, and the research that goes along with that. Pretty nifty, the idea of a decentralized internet thing...
Work on UPB hasn't stopped, but it hasn't been zipping forward either. Newer versions of the Unreal Engine have dropped since UPB's incepetion, and brought with them more perforance and some happy bug-fixes that directly affected the project. The big slowdown though, was lack of a concrete vision for the... visual style of it all. Everyone who set eye on it, and has seen the various renditions of the style, all (even the colorblind guy!) agreed that the simple, lo-fi/retro style was the coolest. Makes my life easier, as well as stays in line with where I wanted to go visually.
Could Be Half-Time
That being said, some new screens and/or video candy should be coming along soon. My Unreal Engine and design skills have gone up a bit in the last several months, which UPB and all the other projects being worked on benefit from. It's science. Or so I'm told. Speaking of other projects... Cogitatio. That site being hosted at GitHub was built with the aforemention Jekyll. More madness ensues.
Getting a local Jekyll development environment set up on Windows was fun. I bit the bullet and installed the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and was pleasantly surprised at how well it actually runs. It feels good to be hacking away at the bash again. So got all that set up, got Ruby installed, got a bunch of other nerdy things. Another side project is "Crepido", which in a nutshell is a boilerplate for Jekyll projects. I like the idea of automating stuff, so why not throw Grunt in the mix? Yeah, madness has ensued.
Back to the Unreal Engine front, I dove back into the C++ jungle and have gotten down basic plugin development. The move over to C++ based projects was a long time ago, because it just makes sense. The first plugin from the Cogitatio family, Hora, is currently in beta. She's running pretty well, but I want to tighten up the feature-set and make things prettier all-around. Not a lot to look at, but alas. This will be our first plugin submitted to the Unreal Marketplace, so that's exciting. Just waiting to hear back from Epic. From what I've read, this can be a bit frustrating.
Other Bits and/or Fragments
The biggest thing on my plate right now is closing the gaping holes in Erebus Design itself. Our site is still just a sad little thing. Internal assets and documentation look like a lazy-yet-insane, meth-head teenager's room. Work seriously needs to be done on getting out there more with the social media side of things. YouTube is the biggest beast, because soon we are going to be more public-facing and I'd very much like to have a stack of content waiting for peeps when they start rolling along. Tutorials, teasers, demo-reels, so on and so forth. I'm not a dinosaur, but a spider monkey told this old lizard that video is the hot new thing [insert statistics here].
The last year or so has really felt like I was pushing all this junk up a big hill, and instead of bumping each piece over the other side gradually? I'm stacking all of it at the peak with the intent of shoving it all down in one huge mass. Then taking a much needed vacation.
See You Next... Week?
So many projects, so little team. It's hard to stay on top of it all and keep a fast pace about it. I'm more of a do a little here, a bunch there kinda guy... Scattered. That's the word. If I specialized in one given thing and put as much energy into that as I do into the dozens of other bits? That one thing would probably be pretty swell. For now, expect the random drop-offs or spurts of weekly's. I swear I'm not on drugs. I'm too poor for drugs, dammit.