Mike Bell

CTO at Mercuna Developments, the AI Navigation solution for Unreal Engine and Unity.
Mastodon: @[email protected] and @[email protected]

[Mike Bell @mdb036]

@puzzpintlondon Hello! Is Puzzled Pint Live going to be available today?

[Mike Bell @mdb036]

@shrewsburyfolk I don’t know what someone did to the toilet block near Sabrina, but did it really require over an hour of loud noise (still going on!) to sort out this morning?!

[Matthew Venn @matthewvenn]

31b-PrimeDetector is the #TinyTapeout design of the week!

It takes in a 31-bit number and attempts to divide the value by all numbers less than it; if it finds one that divides evenly, the logic stops and declares the number not prime.

https://t.co/eNNITEyWdm

[Mike Bell @mdb036]

Excellent @Blackbeards_TP gig tonight! Small village hall but lots of people up and dancing by the end!

[Mike Bell @mdb036]

This was one of my features for the new v2.6 release, there were quite a few edge cases to handle and it revealed some tricky issues with vertical generation box boundaries.

It's good to see them working well now - I'm pretty pleased with the results!

[Mike Bell @mdb036]

Mercuna now supports cutting out stationary obstacles, so paths are found around them.

[Mercuna AI Navigation @MercunaDev]

⅛
Navmesh cutting of stationary obstacles is one of those features that sounds simple, but there are complexities when you get into the detail. A two day long thread on our approach and some of the challenges:

[Mike Bell @mdb036]

@EddiesTech @gandibar I feel like @gandibar hasn’t realised yet just how bad a decision this will turn out to be. Many people probably missed this in the update email.

Also starting to apply this charge in the middle of a domain registration period is surely breach of contract?

[Mike Bell @mdb036]

@gandibar With the mailbox price changes, will email redirects still be free?

[Mike Bell @mdb036]

Well I guess it's nice that you can at least speak to someone at DHL when stuff goes wrong.
But an early morning trip to the DHL depot tomorrow morning wasn't really what I wanted!

[Mike Bell @mdb036]

Parcel with @dhlexpressuk due to be delivered today but not shown as having left the local delivery facility. Really could do with it before I go away tomorrow. Anything I can do?

[Mike Bell @mdb036]

@nothings Brilliant, thank you.

Eventually I would like to make something where you can upload vasm and data on to a Pico W, and it assembles and runs it on the attached Hovalaag. So it's great to know I could share that freely - if I ever get around to doing it!

[Mike Bell @mdb036]

@nothings I’m considering putting my Hovalaag cpu implementation on #TinyTapeout. Just checking you are ok for me to do that? As the processor is your design, I thought I should check!
And if that’s ok, would you be willing to share the source for the assembler?

[Mike Bell @mdb036]

I don’t necessarily want the source for the whole exe if that’s difficult to disentangle from the game - just the parser would be fine!

I’m thinking I might implement a superset of the instructions available in game, so being able to tweak it would be handy.

[Mike Bell @mdb036]

@LNER Brilliant - thank you

[Mike Bell @mdb036]

@LNER I've had an email saying my train on 3rd Feb is cancelled and I can rebook free of charge, but if I try to change to a train on the 4th Feb through the website it wants to charge me for the difference in ticket price.
How do I change the booking free of charge?

[Mike Bell @mdb036]

@LNER That's great, how can I make a seat reservation? I imagine the trains on Sat 4th might be pretty busy.

[Teresa Kubacka @paniterka_ch]

Today I asked ChatGPT about the topic I wrote my PhD about. It produced reasonably sounding explanations and reasonably looking citations. So far so good – until I fact-checked the citations. And things got spooky when I asked about a physical phenomenon that doesn’t exist.

[Mike Bell @mdb036]

I’m now pretty much exclusively using Mastodon - miss seeing a few people from here that haven’t moved, but overall it’s a good place to be.

There are some technical problems with it (mostly just clients need improving) but the federated structure seems to work well.

[Mike Bell @mdb036]

Logged back into Twitter specifically to tell @andrewhunterm about the Mosstodon hashtag over in The Good Place.
But it seems he already knows.