Jamie Holding

I have a Home Assistant automation setup at home, and for Christmas I really wanted a button that would turn on all my lights into a specific cosy configuration, switch the tree on, start some Christmas music, but also play a log fire video on my TV. Most of this

My little baby girl is on her way (probably here by the time I publish this). We knew we wanted to theme her nursery to something cool. At one point it was going to be dinosaurs, because dinosaurs are awesome. But that sounded complicated and we are really after subtle

Sometimes it's handy to test triggering a mobile deep link to test some new integration. You may have tried typing the URL into your phone's web browser (like Chrome) to trigger the app launching, however this doesn't work! The link needs to be clicked to trigger. However, instead of creating

A simple singleton pattern for JavaScript classes. class Instances = {}; class MyClass { static get() { if (Instances[this.name] === undefined) { Instances[this.name] = new this(); } return Instances[this.name]; } }Call ```MyClass.get()``` to get a single instance of MyClass. All subsequent calls to .get() will return the same instance. This works because

Don't use LogTemp for everything! It is trivial to setup a new log category in C++. First, in a header in your project add a line like so: DECLARE_LOG_CATEGORY_EXTERN(LogMyAwesomeGame, Log, All);If this is for a specific class, I tend to put this in the header

How to iterate over Actors and other UObjects in Unreal Engine 4. Note: You should be careful using this regularly! You do not want to be iterating over every single object in your game every frame! This is useful for finding objects during a loading screen etc. when a manager/

In Unreal Engine 4 you can change the colour of your Content folder directories to make it easy to identify parts of your project. However, by default, this is only stored locally, and won't be shared with your team through version control. However, with a bit of ini magic, we

Last year my resolution was to complete something every month. I liked the sound of this resolution because I have a heap of random projects I wanted to get done, and hopefully this would finally see an end to some of them... How did I do? Well it started off

The other week I had to walk up and down the office for 20 minutes so the BBC could get a shot of our studio for the opening titles of the local news. And here is the result! And for reference, here I am! (circled in red): I'm famous! I

I found this old project kicking about, and as best I can tell it is from 2012. I remember building this over a weekend when trying to learn how HTML canvases worked. This is a very mini recreation of a basic Pokemon game in a web browser. All you can

Recently I've upgraded a personal project to Unreal 4.23 and found that we had a crash in Shipping-only! So I needed to figure out how to debug this. The error I was getting was: "Fatal Error Material not found" Line 2046 I tried to reproduce this issue in a

This is a simple method to take screenshots in-game using Unreal Engine 4.23. Execute this code somewhere in your project and it will generate a PNG screenshot at the same resolution your game is currently rendering at. // Generate a filename based on the current date const FDateTime Now = FDateTime:

I am now husband to my amazing wife. I can't want to continue exploring the world and life together with her forever.

This post is designed for Windows builds of Unreal Engine 4 titles made with 4.21. This will likely work with previous versions, and maybe even future versions of the engine. Your mileage may vary. DisclaimerNote: I will not be helping you find keys for specific titles. So don't ask.

I recently took a day off work to put this thing together. When I was a kid, I had a plastic model set of a Pirate Ship flat ride. I loved this thing. It was really detailed and great fun to build. The instructions mentioned you could upgrade it with

Last year I published a blog post about bypassing certificate pinning using a tool called Objection. https://blog.jamie.holdings/2018/09/05/bypass-certificate-pinning-on-android/ Since then I have encountered Android research opportunities with more complex certificate pinning methods not covered by Objection. So I had to learn more about how

A few months ago I gave a talk at Solent University in Southampton about getting a job in the Games Industry. While I was writing my presentation, I found I was re-treading a lot of the same ground from another presentation I attended before I entered the Games Industry. In

Update: This blog post has gotten a lot more attention than anything else I have written, so I have also written up an advanced guide for more complex SSL pinning bypass techniques: https://blog.jamie.holdings/2019/01/19/advanced-certificate-bypassing-in-android-with-frida/ A common requirement when performing security research is to intercept

This is a simple example using Promises in a reduce call to execute mkdir commands in sequence. I'm using the util.promisify utility to automatically convert the standard fs functions into Promises. Because the last Promise resolved in the reduce is passed the full path to make, this function also

I recently was asked to write a blog post about my job at nDreams, where I'm currently a Senior Programmer. I was asked to not go too deep into the nitty gritty and keep it accessible for people not in the industry already, so it's not as technical as I

Often on a project it's handy to have a "template level" which you can use to start building new maps from. Unreal already comes with a few template levels for you to pick from in the "New Level" window: How do we add our own maps to this window? Thankfully

This was something I wanted to figure out recently, as I don't want to be relying on (dodgy?) third-party sites to grab APKs when researching. Here is how you fetch an APK off your device using ADB. You'll need to have ADB already setup on your machine and connected to

Immersive Theatre Meets TechnologyI love immersive theatre and I work in VR Game Development. So when an immersive theatre production using VR arrived in London, I had to go check it out! Somnai is an immersive theatre event by Ellipsis Entertainment (dotdot). You are led through a series of rooms

I'm a rising star! https://www.gamesindustry.biz/top100/2018/i-k (Mirror #1) I was asked a few questions via email, but somebody also appears to have spied on my Twitter and LinkedIn, and they produced this short piece about me! It was clear from a young age that Jamie

Previously I've been using Jekyll for my blog (see https://blog.jamie.holdings/2016/10/15/hello-jekyll/) - however I was finding the publishing and maintenance (oh what, the bundle dependencies have changed again?!) a pain stopping me from writing. All I wanted was a simple blogging experience so I