Do you know what is more annoying than a crash? A crash that you don’t know how to track down. You are praying for not being in a situation where no debugger is attached or there is no crash log. Sadly – this is a very common situation when you are working with the external engine, on a mobile device.

Android c++ crash logs are even more nasty, because of their binary format. In fact – they are minidumps, the same format the Microsoft is using for dumping Windows crash data. To encrypt the Android’s minidumps you need to do some voodoo with Google Breakpad.

Rvalue references are one of the biggest feature introduced to the c++11, but I found it rather difficult to understand and to find a usage for them. It was the issue which was very similar to the understanding c++ traits I had. Now, I’d like to write down all what I’ve learned, in order to remember it better and to share the way I understand it the best. This article is a very quick introduce to why we need rvalue references and why they are awesome!

Here we are – at the edge of the end of the year. For me it was a really good year. I’ve been on some game jams, made cool games, had a road trip to the USA, been on lots of conferences, met lots of new people… Yeah, it was good.

But the new year is comming and with it – new challenges. I know that it is only a number and the concept of time is a funny thing in general, but this is still a good measurement point for what you have accomplished and what you can do in the future. Let’s say, it’s like a very long scrum’s sprint!

So, here are some little changes on the webpage (which, by the way, is here for over 2 years, wohoo!):

So there was a game jam lately. A really Huuuge Game Jam I must say. During 24 hours we had to make a game based on a specific theme. The theme was… well… It was nothing explicit. The only thing we’ve got was this image:

The interpretations were vary. There were games about Lego, about stairs and about relativity and impossible geometry. Most of the games were playing with the geometry. Mine too!

Hi there! Here’s a little announcement.

If you were checking this blog regularly you probably know the UE4 Roller Tutorial for beginners I was making. It was an experiment which goal was to learn others and myself how to use Unreal Engine 4 by making a simple physics based game.

In the end, it was a fail. First of all, the free time for making tutorials ended, because I had to focus on Real Boxiing 2. Second – tutorials weren’t done well and the flow was completely wrong. This is why I’ve removed all of the videos from public domain of youtube, so nobody will learn bad practices I was showing. There are much better tutorials, which I showed in the “Starting an adventure with the Unreal Engine 4″ article lately.

If you, for some reason, still want to check the Roller Tutorial, here are the videos with projects:

• Basics – Video – Project
• Collectible coins – Video – Project
• HUD – Video – Project
• Respawn – Video – Project
• Adding Second Player – Video – Project
• Unified Camera – Video – Project

When your app is growing, also its needs. Google Play, Facebook, analytics systems, advertising, crash reporters and more are put into the build and at some point the infamous “64k methods” problem occurs. Why? According to the Android Developer’s User Guide:

In other words – you can’t have more than 65,536 methods in Your java code (and it’s not so difficult to do this, because the full Google Play SDK uses about half of this limit).

Dealing with this problem is rather easy… if you are using Gradle. Unfortunatelly Unreal Engine 4 still uses Ant. So, what do we do when the “64k problem” hits us? Do we cry and fall into despair? No, no, no… This is how you can fix this:

So,.. I was at the Game Industry Conference in Poznań and I was lecturing about Unreal Engine 4 on mobiles and about Websockets. Because some of the attendants were asking about the presentations to download here are the links!

• Unreal Engine 4 and mobiles, so how does it work?
• Using Websockets in RealBoxing®, things we’ve learned.

Also I’d like to thank all of you for been there. And for votes. You are awesome!

In Unreal Engine 4 to build a source code for the iOS build the Mac computer with installed Xcode is needed. If you are working for other platforms too, having two machines with separate projects might be troublesome. Or maybe you cannot afford buying a Mac for every working station? You can start a building process on the PC with Windows which will send the source code to the Mac computer, compile the code there, get the results and finish cooking and packaging the ipa on PC. How to do this? Here are the instructions!

Unreal Engine 4 is a vast and powerful tool which makes making games fun! But, as any complex piece of software, it might be challenging to start learning it. It is not because of a lack of the documentation or tutorials, but because of, ironically, the huge amount of them! Try to search for a UE4 tutorial on youtube. The number of results is overwhelming! Where to start?

During my learning process I was digging around, searching for a perfect, well explaining tutorial which will introduce me to the world of the UE4. I was trying to even do my own series, which didn’t end bad, but it’s far worse than I’d like to. This article will mostly show the collection of the best learning materials I was able to find, so you won’t have to go through the same issue I had.

What is quite interesting, most of the materials are the official tutorials, made by Epic crew. Big applause for taking such a good care for the new adventurers!

UE4 is, of course, a very big tool and it contains many instruments. You can spend years for mastering the material editor, or particle editor, or the animation system only. I will show materials telling how to easily jump into the making simple games without knowing every detail of the engine. It will be an entry point. Mastering the tool is a different story.

Traits in C++ is a concept of using templates in order to implement different behaviour for the same class/function depending on the types that are used inside of them.

Ok, so why am I writing about this again?

There are many readings about traits, but for some reason I had trouble with understanding them, probably because of lack of life examples. I finaly got it when I had to use them on my own. So I decided to tell about my work, so maybe it will help someone to understand what it is and what cool stuff can be done with it.