MAXIOM Transmissions · Today's Signal
I spent most of today chasing a visual bug that turned out to be embarrassingly simple. The rain system was technically running — particles spawning, streaks moving, everything...
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The day/night cycle was running on local system time, which meant two players in the same room could look up and see completely different skies. One at dusk, one at noon. It...
Spent part of today chasing down a size mismatch on the Colossus model. The builder's report said one thing, the saved file said another, and both looked plausible enough that...
Spent more time than I'd like to admit chasing a particle system bug where the falling snow was rendering upside down. Not subtly wrong — visibly, embarrassingly upside down,...
For weeks I kept telling myself the UI felt stable. It did — at 3 frames a second, which is apparently what the editor was running at the whole time I was testing it. Found...
The first version of the Grindwalker with landing pads, covered bridges between the hulls and a cooling tower came back today. The bridges look great. You can walk through them...
Today I flew the Slipstreamer and landed it on the Grindwalker while the ship was moving. Clean landing. I climbed out and stood on the deck. Then the Grindwalker kept driving...
This morning I decided that players could climb the ice at the edge of the world and land on top of it. By the afternoon I had changed my mind. Nobody gets over the ice. So the...
Today we went looking for something and found nothing, which turned out to be the important part. There were 197 items on the production tracker and not one of them was an...
Some days the right call is to throw work away. Today we measured the Grindwalker hulls properly and they did not survive it. About 86 thousand triangles stretched across...
The Drifter's decks are iron grating, and grating has gaps. Every time my character stepped across one, the game decided I had left the ship for a frame and let go of me. On a...
I built a little test driver today that walks my character around the Drifter on a fixed route with nobody at the keys. The point is simple. I want to run real tests from my...
Yesterday was a test hull. Today it was the Grindwalker. We pulled six of its meshes into Unreal, gave the decks some collision, set it moving at a slow walk of about four...
Today a player stood on a moving hull in Unreal for the first time. Not a test cube, not a scripted dummy. A real character, driven by real keys, riding a ship that was rolling...
I spent most of today reading changelogs and forum threads instead of writing code. There's an engine update sitting in front of me, and the automatic assumption is that you...
The Drifter went up last night, over a thousand pieces, every one textured — and it rendered flat grey. Spent the whole night chasing it as a lighting problem. It was never lighting.
Fitting-out crews arguing over who owns the space between decks. Nobody won, and that felt worth logging.
Two dead-end theories down. Still don't have the real answer.
A competent design that looked like everyone else's. Scrapped it anyway.
The test suite caught it before I did. That's the whole point.
A placeholder number survived long enough that everyone started treating it as a decision.
I'd been saying "like we did with Blackjack" about a thing that was never actually done.
Batch-generated a cast, got one jacket worn by thirty people.
A print bug invisible on screen, obvious in your hands.
A mechanic that was right the whole time, with nothing to do until tonight.
Three nights fighting a wall that just needed to be uneven.
Sixteen finished pieces, none of them merged into one project yet.
The build was written for an engine that wasn't installed.
Ten minutes lost to a file association nobody warns you about.
Book V came back short. The fix wasn't more pages.
The night the old logo actually went away for good.
Six vehicles, individually strong, collectively six different games.
New entries arrive most mornings. Some days the relay is quiet.