Pathfinding in Unreal Engine can become very overwhelming, as soon as you want to go beyond simplistic two dimensional pathing. Luckily there is a plugin, which allows us to create a simple Behaviour Tree (from now “BT”) for any kind of pathfinding - even if there are very dynamicly moving objects in the level.

This is the BT we will create. It retrieves the player location and then executes an action (in this case “Shoot”), while flying (pathfinding) towards the player location - if the player is beyond a threshold range. …

For a while now, there has been a discussion on the horizon in my country, as to the question, wherever private businesses should be allowed to treat vaccinated people differently (i.e. normally), as long as not everybody had the chance to get vaccinated.

At the moment the German government and specifically the German Ethics Council, which advises the government in such matters, took the (only) easy way out: As long as it isn’t fully established, that a vaccinated person can’t infect an unvaccinated person, obviously, they can’t be treated differently. However at the moment, it seems more and more likely…

I recently had to create an UI in Unreal Engine, and being the gimp-grouch that I am, I instantly thought I could (ab-)use LibreCAD, an Open Source technical drawing program, to create a scalable vector UI.

There was just one problem. Unreal Engine can’t import vector graphics.

This article assumes you have basic knowledge of Unreal Engine and C++. LibreCAD, as long as you only want to draw some straight lines, is completely self explanatory.

Now, there are more sensible solutions to this, you could just buy an SVG-importer on the marketplace, for a mere 20 bucks. You could also…

One of the best additions to browser capabilities in recent years was the addition of service workers and offline support in general. We can now preload data, like articles or network intensive data like pictures, style-sheets or JavaScript libraries, from our web service. This is extremely useful for mobile devices in regions with unstable or slow internet connection. (…like this backwater country in the middle of Europe I am living in.)

Basics

The general approach is, to check for new content, whenever there is an internet connection (or access to WLAN) and display it on demand. The service worker is just…

My recent article about VPN shilling on YouTube, has really made me think about which creators I actually still enjoy.

So, in case you can’t stand watching another, meaningless, infotainment video, which the YouTube algorithm suggested to you or which you got click-baited into (“What if we put a nuke on the moon “— no I’m not going to link it, I don’t want it to get any more views.) Here are some great, zero click-bait channels, which really dig into topics, with widespread scientific illiteracy.

1. Peter “potholer54" Hadfield

Peter Hadfield, is a long time journalist, who posted entirely undercover as Potholer54 for…

This article is a indirect successor to JavaScript-lazyload. You might want to read this first. To recap: We have designed a JavaScript routine, which will load images based on the view-ports size and position. Previously we have pre-generated those images and returned specific resolutions as static content, now we want to automatically scale images according to URL arguments.

Flask location block

In this guide we assume a media URL will look like this:

In this article I will showcase a template to activate an arbitrary application once it is accessed and deactivate it again automatically if it’s no longer used. While it is not difficult per se it unfortunately requires a lot of systemd units and can be confusion at first. If you only want the code go to my GitHub.

Overview

Actual service

Assuming we have a file /usr/bin/roflcopter.sh that runs continuously once started and provides a service on a Unix or network socket, we first need a systemd unit that starts this program.

[Unit]
Description=ScriptWapper
Requires=check-deactivate.service

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/roflcopter.sh
ExecStop=pkill roflcopter

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Systemd socket proxy

We…

I like to start my flask projects with a simple __name__ == "__main__" with argparse and app.run(). But obviously the flask inbuilt server is not the fastest and probably not the safest either. This is why you should eventually use a WSGI-runner like waitress to run your app. This post will show how to migrate, while keeping any standalone capabilities.

Migrating “__init__” code

In short, everything in your if __name__ block is not going to be executed anymore, the simplest solution is to move it to a @app.before_first_request anotated function, so:

app = Flask("LOL")

if __init__ == "__name__":
    # arparse stuff…