Finally started watching a (long!) video about the UE Gameplay Ability System. I'd tried to get a sense for it from the written docs, but they just don't go into enough detail on how & why you might use it in practice. More like 1 paragraph on each bit & then "go read the Lyra source". Needing to watch a 3h video has been a blocker on me bothering to dig more before now.
I don't think it's something I'll use on this game, but I can definitely see the utility. Just a lot of moving parts!
Tech industry, please hire more writers. I can happily read docs for 3h and get much more out of them than watching a video for 3h. And while I'm watching the video, I'm making copious notes so that I don't have to watch the video again later to refresh my memory. If it was written down in the first place with good indexing I wouldn't have to do that. Video is such a crap way to document things.
@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place
I know that the excuse for this is “young people like video”, but I call BS on that. I think the real reason is that with video you can repurpose your existing dev talent and not have to hire tech writers. Just put the most cogent of your devs in front of the camera for an afternoon, job done right? Shared skill set, no need for writing specialism or ongoing editing / maintenance, just stick the video online and point to that for the next 3 years. Absolutely says cost cutting to me
Also I want to point out that with any talk over 30 minutes your stupid self-sabotaging human brain is going to eventually isolate the one very slightly annoying involuntary thing the speaker does and fixate on it until you can hardly bear to listen to them anymore. Not the speaker's fault, we all have these things, that's why we don't normally shut ourselves in a soundproof room for 3h with one other person talking at us non-stop.
Hey that's NOT how I remember certain lessons at UNI with the teacher also writing on the whiteboards formulae non-stop 
I still can't forget "that afternoon" when ".. the general starred polygon formed by connecting N points in a plane .. " ( after 2 hours non stop and still going ) ... then I asked myself WTF AM I DOING HERE !!!?? .. A critical point, that was the beginning of my decision to QUIT UNI, which in the end I did .. I still have nightmares ... ".. for certain epsilon ".
I must add that "the way I remember UNI in 1994" ( in Italy ) was NOT "we are here to tech you things" was ALL about "we are here to keep the best and throw away all the rest" .. it was .. brutal to say the least .. "If you did not understand a thing it was all YOUR fault" and if you could not keep up with speed you were GONE . I never struggled so much (*) to understand things and finding "all by my own" .. It wasn't exactly "learning" it was a "trying to learn the super hard way".
(*) no I am wrong .. I think I should add here trying to develop native CPP on Oculus using ANDROID STUDIO following the setup instructions that NEVER WENT AS THEY SAY IT SHOULD getting NUTS with that "Gradle" and makefiles in the end having something that did work for 2 weeks until it started to "partially fail" ( Android Studio NOT the code ) generating mysterious errors and not doing things it should have been done but never worked ! I think that was really "close to madness".
. I liked the subjects, just not the schooling experience
