In June, we hosted a webinar featuring experts from Arm, the Unity Accelerate Solutions team, and SYBO Games, the creator of Subway Surfers. The resulting roundtable focused on profiling tips and strategies for mobile games, the business implications of poor performance, and how SYBO shipped a hit mobile game with 3 billion downloads to date.Let’s dive into some of the follow-up questions we didn’t have time to cover during the webinar. You can also watch the full recording.We hear a lot about the Unity Profiler in relation to CPU profiling, but not as much about the Profile Analyzer (available as a Unity package). Are there any plans to improve it or integrate it into the core Profiler toolset?There are no immediate plans to integrate the Profile Analyzer into the core Editor, but this might change as our profiling tools evolve.Does Unity have any plans to add an option for the GPU Usage Profiler module to appear in percentages like it does in milliseconds?That’s a great idea, and while we can’t say yes or no at the time of this blog post, it’s a request that’s been shared with our R&D teams for possible future consideration.Do you have plans for tackling “Application Not Responding” (ANR) errors that are reported by the Google Play store and don’t contain any stack trace?Although we don’t have specific plans for tracking ANR without stack trace at the moment, we will consider it for the future roadmap.How can I share my feedback to help influence the future development of Unity’s profiling tools?You can keep track of upcoming features and share feedback via our product board and forums. We are also conducting a survey to learn more about our customers’ experience with the profiling tools. If you’ve used profiling tools before (either daily or just once) or are working on a project that requires optimization, we would love to get your input. The survey is designed to take no more than 5–10 minutes to complete.By participating, you’ll also have the chance to opt into a follow-up interview to share more feedback directly with the development team, including the opportunity to discuss potential prototypes of new features.Is there a good rule for determining what counts as a viable low-end device to target?A rule of thumb we hear from many Unity game developers is to target devices that are five years old at the time of your game’s release, as this helps to ensure the largest user base. But we also see teams reducing their release-date scope to devices that are only three years old if they’re aiming for higher graphical quality. A visually complex 3D application, for example, will have higher device requirements than a simple 2D application. This approach allows for a higher “min spec,” but reduces the size of the initial install base. It’s essentially a business decision: Will it cost more to develop for and support old devices than what your game will earn running on them?Sometimes the technical requirements of your game will dictate your minimum target specifications. So if your game uses up large amounts of texture memory even after optimization, but you absolutely cannot reduce quality or resolution, that probably rules out running on phones with insufficient memory. If your rendering solution requires compute shaders, that likely rules out devices with drivers that can’t support OpenGL ES 3.1, Metal, or Vulkan.It’s a good idea to look at market data for your priority target audience. For instance, mobile device specs can vary a lot between countries and regions. Remember to define some target “budgets” so that benchmarking goals for what’s acceptable are set prior to choosing low-end devices for testing.For live service games that will run for years, you’ll need to monitor their compatibility continuously and adapt over time based on both your actual user base and current devices on the market.Is it enough to test performance exclusively on low-end devices to ensure that the game will also run smoothly on high-end ones?It might be, if you have a uniform workload on all devices. However, you still need to consider variations across hardware from different vendors and/or driver versions.It’s common for graphically rich games to have tiers of graphical fidelity – the higher the visual tier, the more resources required on capable devices. This tier selection might be automatic, but increasingly, users themselves can control the choice via a graphical settings menu. For this style of development, you’ll need to test at least one “min spec” target device per feature/workload tier that your game supports.If your game detects the capabilities of the device it’s running on and adapts the graphics output as needed, it could perform differently on higher end devices. So be sure to test on a range of devices with the different quality levels you’ve programmed the title for.Note: In this section, we’ve specified whether the expert answering is from Arm or Unity.Do you have advice for detecting the power range of a device to support automatic quality settings, particularly for mobile?Arm: We typically see developers doing coarse capability binning based on CPU and GPU models, as well as the GPU shader core count. This is never perfect, but it’s “about right.” A lot of studios collect live analytics from deployed devices, so they can supplement the automated binning with device-specific opt-in/opt-out to work around point issues where the capability binning isn’t accurate enough.As related to the previous question, for graphically rich content, we see a trend in mobile toward settings menus where users can choose to turn effects on or off, thereby allowing them to make performance choices that suit their preferences.Unity: Device memory and screen resolution are also important factors for choosing quality settings. Regarding textures, developers should be aware that Render Textures used by effects or post-processing can become a problem on devices with high resolution screens, but without a lot of memory to match.Given the breadth of configurations available (CPU, GPU, SOC, memory, mobile, desktop, console, etc.), can you suggest a way to categorize devices to reduce the number of tiers you need to optimize for?Arm: The number of tiers your team optimizes for is really a game design and business decision, and should be based on how important pushing visual quality is to the value proposition of the game. For some genres it might not matter at all, but for others, users will have high expectations for the visual fidelity.Does the texture memory limit differ among models and brands of Android devices that have the same amount of total system memory?Arm: To a first-order approximation, we would expect the total amount of texture memory to be similar across vendors and hardware generations. There will be minor differences caused by memory layout and alignment restrictions, so it won’t be exactly the same.Is it CPU or GPU usage that contributes the most to overheating on mobile devices?Arm: It’s entirely content dependent. The CPU, GPU, or the DRAM can individually overheat a high-end device if pushed hard enough, even if you ignore the other two completely. The exact balance will vary based on the workload you are running.What tips can you give for profiling on devices that have thermal throttling? What margin would you target to avoid thermal throttling (i.e., targeting 20 ms instead of 33 ms)?Arm: Optimizing for frame time can be misleading on Android because devices will constantly adjust frequency to optimize energy usage, making frame time an incomplete measure by itself. Preferably, monitor CPU and GPU cycles per frame, as well as GPU memory bandwidth per frame, to get some value that is independent of frequency. The cycle target you need will depend on each device’s chip design, so you’ll need to experiment.Any optimization helps when it comes to managing power consumption, even if it doesn’t directly improve frame rate. For example, reducing CPU cycles will reduce thermal load even if the CPU isn’t the critical path for your game.Beyond that, optimizing memory bandwidth is one of the biggest savings you can make. Accessing DRAM is orders of magnitude more expensive than accessing local data on-chip, so watch your triangle budget and keep data types in memory as small as possible.Unity: To limit the impact of CPU clock frequency on the performance metrics, we recommend trying to run at a consistent temperature. There are a couple of approaches for doing this:Run warm: Run the device for a while so that it reaches a stable warm state before profiling.Run cool: Leave the device to cool for a while before profiling. This strategy can eliminate confusion and inconsistency in profiling sessions by taking captures that are unlikely to be thermally throttled. However, such captures will always represent the best case performance a user will see rather than what they might actually see after long play sessions. This strategy can also delay the time between profiling runs due to the need to wait for the cooling period first.With some hardware, you can fix the clock frequency for more stable performance metrics. However, this is not representative of most devices your users will be using, and will not report accurate real-world performance. Basically, it’s a handy technique if you are using a continuous integration setup to check for performance changes in your codebase over time.Any thoughts on Vulkan vs OpenGL ES 3 on Android? Vulkan is generally slower performance-wise. At the same time, many devices lack support for various features on ES3.Arm: Recent drivers and engine builds have vastly improved the quality of the Vulkan implementations available; so for an equivalent workload, there shouldn’t be a performance gap between OpenGL ES and Vulkan (if there is, please let us know). The switch to Vulkan is picking up speed and we expect to see more people choosing Vulkan by default over the next year or two. If you have counterexamples of areas where Vulkan isn’t performing well, please get in touch with us. We’d love to hear from you.What tools can we use to monitor memory bandwidth (RAM <-> VRAM)?Arm: The Streamline Profiler in Arm Mobile Studio can measure bandwidth between Mali GPUs and the external DRAM (or system cache).Should you split graphical assets by device tiers or device resolution?Arm: You can get the best result by retuning assets, but it’s expensive to do. Start by reducing resolution and frame rate, or disabling some optional post-processing effects.What is the best way to record performance metric statistics from our development build?Arm: You can use the Performance Advisor tool in Arm Mobile Studio to automatically capture and export performance metrics from the Mali GPUs, although this comes with a caveat: The generation of JSON reports requires a Professional Edition license.Unity: The Unity Profiler can be used to view common rendering metrics, such as vertex and triangle counts in the Rendering module. Plus you can include custom packages, such as System Metrics Mali, in your project to add low-level Mali GPU metrics to the Unity Profiler.What are your recommendations for profiling shader code?You need a GPU Profiler to do this. The one you choose depends on your target platform. For example, on iOS devices, Xcode’s GPU Profiler includes the Shader Profiler, which breaks down shader performance on a line-by-line basis.Arm Mobile Studio supports Mali Offline Compiler, a static analysis tool for shader code and compute kernels. This tool provides some overall performance estimates and recommendations for the Arm Mali GPU family.When profiling, the general rule is to test your game or app on the target device(s). With the industry moving toward more types of chipsets (Apple M1, Arm, x86 by Intel, AMD, etc.), how can developers profile and pinpoint issues on the many different hardware configurations in a reasonable amount of time?The proliferation of chipsets is primarily a concern on desktop platforms. There are a limited number of hardware architectures to test for console games. On mobile, there’s Apple’s A Series for iOS devices and a range of Arm and Qualcomm architectures for Android – but selecting a manageable list of representative mobile devices is pretty straightforward.On desktop it’s trickier because there’s a wide range of available chipsets and architectures, and buying Macs and PCs for testing can be expensive. Our best advice is to do what you can. No studio has infinite time and money for testing. We generally wouldn’t expect any huge surprises when comparing performance between an Intel x86 CPU and a similarly specced AMD processor, for instance. As long as the game performs comfortably on your minimum spec machine, you should be reasonably confident about other machines. It’s also worth considering using analytics, such as Unity Analytics, to record frame rates, system specs, and player options’ settings to identify hotspots or problematic configurations.We’re seeing more studios move to using at least some level of automated testing for regular on-device profiling, with summary stats published where the whole team can keep an eye on performance across the range of target devices. With well-designed test scenes, this can usually be made into a mechanical process that’s suited for automation, so you don’t need an experienced technical artist or QA tester running builds through the process manually.Do you ever see performance issues on high-end devices that don’t occur on the low-end ones?It’s uncommon, but we have seen it. Often the issue lies in how the project is configured, such as with the use of fancy shaders and high-res textures on high-end devices, which can put extra pressure on the GPU or memory. Sometimes a high-end mobile device or console will use a high-res phone screen or 4K TV output as a selling point but not necessarily have enough GPU power or memory to live up to that promise without further optimization.If you make use of the current versions of the C# Job System, verify whether there’s a job scheduling overhead that scales with the number of worker threads, which in turn, scales with the number of CPU cores. This can result in code that runs more slowly on a 64+ core Threadripper™ than on a modest 4-core or 8-core CPU. This issue will be addressed in future versions of Unity, but in the meantime, try limiting the number of job worker threads by setting JobsUtility.JobWorkerCount.What are some pointers for setting a good frame budget?Most of the time when we talk about frame budgets, we’re talking about the overall time budget for the frame. You calculate 1000/target frames per second (fps) to get your frame budget: 33.33 ms for 30 fps, 16.66 ms for 60 fps, 8.33 ms for 120 Hz, etc. Reduce that number by around 35% if you’re on mobile to give the chips a chance to cool down between each frame. Dividing the budget up to get specific sub-budgets for different features and/or systems is probably overkill except for projects with very specific, predictable systems, or those that make heavy use of Time Slicing.Generally, profiling is the process of finding the biggest bottlenecks – and therefore, the biggest potential performance gains. So rather than saying, “Physics is taking 1.2 ms when the budget only allows for 1 ms,” you might look at a frame and say, “Rendering is taking 6 ms, making it the biggest main thread CPU cost in the frame. How can we reduce that?”It seems like profiling early and often is still not common knowledge. What are your thoughts on why this might be the case?Building, releasing, promoting, and managing a game is difficult work on multiple fronts. So there will always be numerous priorities vying for a developer’s attention, and profiling can fall by the wayside. They know it’s something they should do, but perhaps they’re unfamiliar with the tools and don’t feel like they have time to learn. Or, they don’t know how to fit profiling into their workflows because they’re pushed toward completing features rather than performance optimization.Just as with bugs and technical debt, performance issues are cheaper and less risky to address early on, rather than later in a project’s development cycle. Our focus is on helping to demystify profiling tools and techniques for those developers who are unfamiliar with them. That’s what the profiling e-book and its related blog post and webinar aim to support.Is there a way to exclude certain methods from instrumentation or include only specific methods when using Deep Profiling in the Unity Profiler? When using a lot of async/await tasks, we create large stack traces, but how can we avoid slowing down both the client and the Profiler when Deep Profiling?You can enable Allocation call stacks to see the full call stacks that lead to managed allocations (shown as magenta in the Unity CPU Profiler Timeline view). Additionally, you can – and should! – manually instrument long-running methods and processes by sprinkling ProfilerMarkers throughout your code. There’s currently no way to automatically enable Deep Profiling or disable profiling entirely in specific parts of your application. But manually adding ProfilerMarkers and enabling Allocation call stacks when required can help you dig down into problem areas without having to resort to Deep Profiling.As of Unity 2022.2, you can also use our IgnoredByDeepProfilerAttribute to prevent the Unity Profiler from capturing method calls. Just add the IgnoredByDeepProfiler attribute to classes, structures, and methods.Where can I find more information on Deep Profiling in Unity?Deep Profiling is covered in our Profiler documentation. Then there’s the most in-depth, single resource for profiling information, the Ultimate Guide to profiling Unity games e-book, which links to relevant documentation and other resources throughout.Is it correct that Deep Profiling is only useful for the Allocations Profiler and that it skews results so much that it’s not useful for finding hitches in the game?Deep Profiling can be used to find the specific causes of managed allocations, although Allocation call stacks can do the same thing with less overhead, overall. At the same time, Deep Profiling can be helpful for quickly investigating why one specific ProfilerMarker seems to be taking so long, as it’s more convenient to enable than to add numerous ProfilerMarkers to your scripts and rebuild your game. But yes, it does skew performance quite heavily and so shouldn’t be enabled for general profiling.Is VSync worth setting to every VBlank? My mobile game runs at a very low fps when it’s disabled.Mobile devices force VSync to be enabled at a driver/hardware level, so disabling it in Unity’s Quality settings shouldn’t make any difference on those platforms. We haven’t heard of a case where disabling VSync negatively affects performance. Try taking a profile capture with VSync enabled, along with another capture of the same scene but with VSync disabled. Then compare the captures using Profile Analyzer to try to understand why the performance is so different.How can you determine if the main thread is waiting for the GPU and not the other way around?This is covered in the Ultimate Guide to profiling Unity games. You can also get more information in the blog post, Detecting performance bottlenecks with Unity Frame Timing Manager.Generally speaking, the telltale sign is that the main thread waits for the Render thread while the Render thread waits for the GPU. The specific marker names will differ depending on your target platform and graphics API, but you should look out for markers with names such as “PresentFrame” or “WaitForPresent.”Is there a solid process for finding memory leaks in profiling?Use the Memory Profiler to compare memory snapshots and check for leaks. For example, you can take a snapshot in your main menu, enter your game and then quit, go back to the main menu, and take a second snapshot. Comparing these two will tell you whether any objects/allocations from the game are still hanging around in memory.Does it make sense to optimize and rewrite part of the code for the DOTS system, for mobile devices including VR/AR? Do you use this system in your projects?A number of game projects now make use of parts of the Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS). Native Containers, the C# Job System, Mathematics, and the Burst compilerare all fully supported packages that you can use right away to write optimal, parallelized, high-performance C# (HPC#) code to improve your project’s CPU performance.A smaller number of projects are also using Entities and associated packages, such as the Hybrid Renderer, Unity Physics, and NetCode. However, at this time, the packages listed are experimental, and using them involves accepting a degree of technical risk. This risk derives from an API that is still evolving, missing or incomplete features, as well as the engineering learning curve required to understand Data-Oriented Design (DOD) to get the most out of Unity’s Entity Component System (ECS). Unity engineer Steve McGreal wrote a guide on DOTS best practices, which includes some DOD fundamentals and tips for improving ECS performance.How do you go about setting limits on SetPass calls or shader complexity? Can you even set limits beforehand?Rendering is a complex process and there is no practical way to set a hard limit on the maximum number of SetPass calls or a metric for shader complexity. Even on a fixed hardware platform, such as a single console, the limits will depend on what kind of scene you want to render, and what other work is happening on the CPU and GPU during a frame.That’s why the rule on when to profile is “early and often.” Teams tend to create a “vertical slice” demo early on during production – usually a short burst of gameplay developed to the level of visual fidelity intended for the final game. This is your first opportunity to profile rendering and figure out what optimizations and limits might be needed. The profiling process should be repeated every time a new area or other major piece of visual content is added.Here are additional resources for learning about performance optimization:BlogsOptimize your mobile game performance: Expert tips on graphics and assetsOptimize your mobile game performance: Expert tips on physics, UI, and audio settingsOptimize your mobile game performance: Expert tips on profiling, memory, and code architecture from Unity’s top engineersExpert tips on optimizing your game graphics for consolesProfiling in Unity 2021 LTS: What, when, and howHow-to pagesProfiling and debugging toolsHow to profile memory in UnityBest practices for profiling game performanceE-booksOptimize your console and PC game performanceOptimize your mobile game performanceUltimate guide to profiling Unity gamesLearn tutorialsProfiling CPU performance in Android builds with Android StudioProfiling applications – Made with UnityEven more advanced technical content is coming soon – but in the meantime, please feel free to suggest topics for us to cover on the forum and check out the full roundtable webinar recording.

Join me in this quick tutorial as we dive into creating a mesmerizing charge effect using Unreal Engine 5.4's Niagara system. Perfect for adding that anime flair to your projects!#UnrealEngine #Niagara #VFX #GameDevelopment #AnimeFX

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Credit: Ian Moore / Mashable Composite; Goodboy Picture Company / E+ / pialhovik / iStock / Getty Images May is National Masturbation Month, and we're celebrating with Feeling Yourself, a series exploring the finer points of self-pleasure. When I look back at pictures of myself in my early 20s, I see a confident young woman who was willing to talk about anything with anyone. But behind closed doors, I was hiding a secret shame that totally contradicted my public brand. I couldn't orgasm — not with a partner, not on my own.There had been fleeting attempts over the years to get the ol' engine rolling. I thought I could reason my way to climax: the internet, with its endless resources in the form of Reddit threads, message boards, and YouTube videos, seemed like the place to go. I turned online for information, emotional (first-person narratives from others who struggled) and practical (sex toys and tutorials). Nothing helped. In fact, all the accumulating knowledge only served to make me feel worse. For it to finally happen, at the age of 25, I had to strip everything back and take my sex drive fully offline for the first time.Failing to climaxThere's a scene in Eve Ensler's legendary play The Vagina Monologues when the audience hears from a woman who didn't have an orgasm until she was 72. "When she finally found her clitoris, she said she cried," the introduction goes. I remember hearing those words at the age of 18 and feeling a fluttering sense of recognition. Then came the chaser: dear god, please let me have one before I'm a septuagenarian. You May Also Like At that age, the inability to orgasm wasn't something that surprised me all that much. I'd read enough teen magazines, seen enough Sex and the City, to know all about the orgasm gap, and that 61 percent of men orgasm every time they have sex compared to 30 percent of women.Multiple studies have found that women are more likely to orgasm during masturbation than intercourse; a similarly consistent finding is that 10 percent of women never orgasm, no matter the circumstances.Yet as I moved through my twenties and failed to rectify the problem, I realised the friends I'd once bonded over this experience with weren't struggling anymore. I felt likeBut as a forthright young feminist on the cusp between the Gen Z and millennial generations, I was also unofficially educated under the tutelage of sex education YouTubers like Shan Boodram, Laci Green, and Hannah Witton. They taught me about the importance of people with vulvas knowing their bodies and having the confidence to tell sexual partners if they weren't getting them off. I spread their message far and wide. Female pleasure was so my brand that a close male friend once gave me a T-shirt with the words "The Future is Female (Ejaculation)" as a Secret Santa gift. I laughed, then went to the bathroom and cried, so deeply full of shame at the disconnect between my public confidence and inward inadequacy.Theoretically speaking, I knew just about everything there was to know about the orgasm…apart from how to have one myself. Very few people, beyond a handful of friends and former partners, knew about my struggle with anorgasmia (where people struggle to climax even with the application of sexual stimulation). I was scared of speaking the words "I can't come" into reality, or of feeling like even more of a failure if they checked in on my progress in the future and I had to tell them that no, I still couldn't.  Theoretically speaking, I knew just about everything there was to know about the orgasm…apart from how to have one myself. As Emily Nagoski writes in her bestselling book Come As You Are, so much of the female orgasm is in the mind. Nagoski theorises that female sexual pleasure has dual controls — an accelerator to turn you on and a brake to turn you off — and that balance is needed to achieve orgasm. But my brake was hyper-sensitive thanks toSex toys felt like a good starting point (god forbid I actually touch myself!), and my limited student budget meant I wanted a vibrator that gave a good bang for my buck, so to speak. I'd spend hours trawling through positive customer reviews for phrases like "can't come" or "never usually orgasm," hoping the same would happen for me if I purchased a clitoral stimulator or CBD lube. When it didn't, I felt more frustrated than ever. Mashable Trend Report: Coming Soon! Decode what’s viral, what’s next, and what it all means. Sign up for Mashable’s weekly Trend Report newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up! What I was searching for was a sense of recognition — an "oh, I'm not alone in this" feeling that my friends, while empathetic, understandably couldn't provide. (Yet whenever I now mention to friends that I didn't have an orgasm until I was 25, similar stories are divulged.) So I looked further afield, scouring message board threads and online articles for narratives from people who'd not been able to come either. The snatched moments of understanding made me feel less alone, albeit not necessarily always better.The next approach was more unconventional. Two friends bought me a subscription to OMGYes, the adult sex education website dedicated to facilitating female pleasure. Initially, I was embarrassed that it had come to this, but I gave it a go. A membership provided access to a library of practical (and extremely NSFW) tutorials on different masturbation techniques. I tried to follow along, but lacked perseverance and was quick to abandon the mission when things didn't happen immediately.At every stage, my attempts to orgasm were hindered by these deeply rooted feelings of shame and inadequacy, and a fear of feeling like even more of a failure should I try and not succeed. I knew I was missing out on an integral part of the human experience, but once the terrifying words "you're going to be on your deathbed never having had an orgasm" enter the mind, they're hard to shake. In order to halt this nihilistic spiral, I stopped trying altogether. It wasn't all bad. The sex, with both long-term and casual partners,So the problem bubbled away beneath the surface, rectifying it as simply not a priority. As with much of life, the arrival of COVID-19 changed things. I remember turning 25 and looking down the barrel of a new year and a third lockdown in the UK. I'm officially in my mid-twenties, I thought. If not now, when? Those interconnected feelings of embarrassment and failure were clearly holding me back. If I was going to figure out how to orgasm, that would only be achieved by removing expectation; expectation that, I realised, was coming directly from the internet aids I'd sought out for help. I needed to strip away the technological trappings and do the one very simple thing I'd been so scared to do: touch myself, and do it consistently. Related Stories What finally helped me orgasmI set myself a challenge. Every day, I would put my phone on the other side of the room and masturbate without sex toys.think these faint flutters were orgasms, and briefly returned to the message boards to see if others had experienced anything similar. Nobody described my exact feelings, but I kept at it.It was a conversation with a close friend, a doctor, that made the most marked difference. I told her about my current state, where I wasn't sure whether I was experiencing an orgasm or not. "You know if you want that to count, it counts," she told me. For the first time, someone was saying that I was on the right path, and not crashing into a wall. Without being dramatic (although said friend still laughs about how I credit her with my first orgasm), those words triggered a switch in my brain. As soon as I stopped feeling like I was foolish for even attempting to fight what I'd always perceived to be a losing battle, orgasms — proper ones, I was sure — came. I didn't cry or rush to text the friends greatly invested in my journey. Don't get me wrong, I was thrilled, but it felt like a wholly personal achievement, and one I wanted to sit in for a while. SEE ALSO: What is a ruined orgasm? Mostly, the feeling was one of relief, the lifting of a huge weight from my chest and the dissipation of so much secret shame. I remember thinking that if I never had an orgasm again, I would be happy. Given how easy I was now finding it once that bridge was crossed, though, I was pretty sure that wasn't going to be the case. I remember thinking that if I never had an orgasm again, I would be happy. If there's one thing I now know, it's that you can't intellectualise, let alone buy, an orgasm. Sure, products and internet resources may help, and in those most isolating moments, it was undoubtedly useful to see my experience reflected back in others. But over time, I found the accumulation of all this knowledge only added to my feelings of failure. I had to remove it all from my mind and do the thing I was most scared to — confront my own body — to make it happen. Given all that, I'm aware of the irony of writing my own "how I finally had an orgasm" narrative. But I know a story like mine, as long as it wasn't dwelled on too long or used as a point of comparison, would have helped my younger self. It's why I keep far less personal aspects of my life out of my work, yet have always known I wanted to write about this experience someday. There are so few narratives about a total inability to orgasm out there. If you're reading this now and see something of yourself in my story, I hope it can provide some. It can happen for you — I truly believe that — whether you're 25 or 72. You'll get there. Isobel Lewis Isobel Lewis is a freelance culture and lifestyle journalist based in London. Formerly of The Independent, she now regularly writes for The New York Times, Service95, and Time Out.

Learn how to transform your shapes into an oval using gradients and texture coordinates in Unreal Engine 5. Perfect for enhancing your VFX skills!#UnrealEngine5 #VFX #NiagaraTutorial #GameDevelopment #CGHow

Project Files: https://www.patreon.com/posts/130238638 . This is the 4th part of the rappel system in Unreal Engine 5 tutorial. In this system, we can place objects in the level that represent rappel points and player can attach a rope/rappel onto these points and climb up or rappel down along vertical walls. When rappel up, once player reach the top of a wall and if up/forward movement input is pressed, the character will climb up the wall and stand up. If player reach the bottom of the wall, or any time at the middle, player can release the rope and fall on the ground. In this episode, we will work on how to descend on the rope and exit from the bottom. Character will let go of the rope and stand back on the ground. ► 👇 𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐥 // 𝐁𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐀 𝐏𝐚𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐧! https://www.patreon.com/codelikeme ►Patrons will have access to project files of all the stuff I do in the channel and other extra benefits Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClb6Jh9EBV7a_Nm52Ipll_Q/join Like my facebook page for more content : https://www.facebook.com/gamedevelopersclub/ Follow me on twitter : https://twitter.com/CodeLikeMe2 Follow me on reddit : https://www.reddit.com/user/codelikeme #CodeLikeMe #unrealengine #ue5 #ue4 #indiegamedev

When George R.R. Martin crafted the world of Westeros back in the 90s, he probably didn’t think his words would go on to spawn graphic novels, TV shows, action figures, video games, and more. Moreover, I doubt the author expected his works to be adapted into a mobile-friendly action-RPG built to prioritize predatory microtransactions over the rich lore he’d spent decades perfecting. Yet in 2025, we have Game of Thrones: Kingsroad, a visually striking open-world exploration game that looks compelling in motion, but hones in more on menus and currency than fantasy adventure. And, as you push deeper into its sizable campaign to uncover a plethora of in-game currencies and progress-halting hurdles, the neo-medieval jaunt starts to feel more like a lesson in asset management than a thoughtful RPG. Kingsroad takes place during season four of the HBO TV series, putting you in the fur-lined boots of a northern-born bastard of House Tyre. With your father sickly and your inheritance caught up in the strict succession rules of the realm, the only hope for the safety of your people is to borrow, beg, and steal your way into the hearts of the lords and ladies of Westeros. Naturally, things aren’t as simple as just asking, and you’ll have to go round the houses (literally) to solve land disputes, find missing soldiers, and knock together the heads of vassal-house warriors on your way to earning your flowers. Alongside a cavalcade of curious NPCs, there are also White Walkers, mythical beasts, and traitorous Boltons to butt heads with. Thankfully, Westeros’ misfortune makes for an enticing landing pad for you to start from. PlayBefore you dive into the cobbled streets and open roads of Westeros, though, you’ll first need to pick a combat archetype to play as: a brutish Sellsword, a skilful Knight, or a nimble Assassin. Fuelled by my love of Brienne of Tarth and Dungeons & Dragons’ Barbarian class, I opted for the axe-wielding Sellsword, whose heavy strikes can easily wind gaggles of enemy forces. Indecisive? Good news: Kingsroad does allow you to switch between archetypes at any time, and your inventory is shared across your three possible characters, so you can boost your alts with your main’s hard-earned loot. That said, I was disappointed to find that once you finalise a character, you can’t delete them and start that class over, or change their name, a feature that bit me in the butt when testing how unsightly I could make my Knight. With your combat destiny chosen, Kingsroad’s decently impressive character creator lets you use a mixture of face-contorting sliders and colour-pickers to specialise your plucky hero. It doesn’t have the depth of something like Dragon’s Dogma 2 (although that’s an admittedly high bar), but I am glad I was able to bestow my characters with an identity that felt personal to me – which is to say moody, and tastefully adorned with smudgy eyeliner and edgy facial scars. You'll explore an impressively recreated map of Westeros.“Kingsroad wastes no time teaching you the basics of its combat and platforming with a tight but comprehensive tutorial, which takes you beyond the wall and back again. That’s where you’ll meet the first of many familiar faces for any fans of the show, as Jon Snow and Samwell Tarley do a decent job of filling in the narrative gaps for those in need of a season four recap. While the digital renditions of these well-known characters aren’t the most flattering, their conversations felt thoughtfully written and helped to establish my lowborn place within the setting. Soon enough, though, Kingsroad lets go of your hand and allows you to roam free across the countryside, providing a choice of campaign quests and side missions to follow, as well as plenty of points of interest to chase on your map. The open world of Kingsroad gave me the freedom to explore this (mostly) faithfully reimagined Westeros, and I enjoyed riding across snowy plateaus and uncovering the secrets of curious stone architecture nestled on the horizon. But the initial exhilaration of high fantasy galavanting wore off quickly as the edges of developer Netmarble’s fantasy panopticon started to show. For every delicate snowflake at Castle Black or butterfly dancing in Winterfell, there were plenty more low-poly fruit trees, bouncy grass patches, and possessed weapons to pick at the sheen. I admire the sheer scale of the open world Kingsroad is offering, but it’s lacking the visual consistency to make it realistic and immersive. As I soon noticed those cracks in the facade, Kingsroad started to feel like a game full of pulled punches, despite how promising it seemed at a distance.This lack of polish extends to your movement on both foot and horseback – ice skating would be the most fitting comparison. When exploring the frosty reaches of the North, this sensation is strangely fitting. However, it became wholly frustrating when it persisted while charting the sunny coastal areas near Highgarden, especially when attempting to complete the occasional platforming puzzles dotted around the icon-covered map. Typically, I was only one slip away from falling down an unscalable hillside, or worse, into a camp of fierce opponents with no way out. Up close, the animations also err on the eerie side in cutscenes. My character would often deliver a wide-eyed death stare, and I couldn't take them seriously as they’d burn holes in the townsfolk’s skulls as they explained their heart wrenching tragedies.Memorable characters surface as uncanny valley clones of themselves.“Speaking of the citizens of Westeros, their heads and eyes wobble around like strange marionettes during conversations, which dampens the atmosphere considerably. It’s a shame, because their dialogue does a great job of affirming the grim, corrupt cloud that hangs over the continent as winter approaches. I felt particularly bad laughing when an old lady thanked me for saving her daughter from being eaten by Ramsay Bolton’s dogs. Unfortunately, the most egregious offenders are often Kingsroad’s recreations of characters from the show. Memorable players, like Nymeria Sand and Varys, surface as uncanny valley clones of their likenesses. I’ll be seeing yassifed Cersei in my nightmares for many moons to come…Beyond exploration, the bulk of your time in Kingsroad is split between investing in complex resource management systems at your homestead and completing multi-stage quests and battles out in the world. As such, you can find a plethora of challenges that boost both of these areas, like dungeon crawls, bandit camps, occupied villages, and giant mythical beasts, all of which reward you handsomely for spilling blood by the gallon. How efficiently you blend your time between these two aspects is integral to maintaining a solid pace within the grind-heavy progression system – alas, a lack of technical balance makes succeeding in this endeavour profoundly painful.Game of Thrones: Kingsroad Gameplay ScreenshotsThe trouble begins with the combat, which is a total mixed bag. While your actions feel pleasantly grounded, and rugged blows always arrive with flashy particle-heavy animations, the process begins to feel overfamiliar fast. Despite the solid variety of moves available – light, heavy, and special attacks, as well as decent dodge and parry options – inaccurate hit boxes consistently hampered my attempts at strategy. Occasionally, I would need to use my head a little and skulk around an area to remove edge threats, though those tactical moments arrived few and far between. It says something unflattering that Kingsroad feels almost identical at 60 hours as it did at 20. You can specialise and upgrade your moveset in combat with traits and skill trees, too, but they do little to impact how the combat feels in motion. Kingsroad gives the impression of having useful Traits by putting options like learning to parry and crafting arrows up at the top of the trees, but as you work your way down, many of the lower options offer small percentage-based improvements to defense and attack that barely make a dent. So as your sparkly slashes lose their lustre, you’re often left cycling through the same few enemies and combos until the battle is won. It seems as though the architecture of a solid combat system is there, but much like the rest of Kingsroad, it’s all facade with no foundation. What hampers the fun most are the frequent and appropriately-named Momentum roadblocks.“Still, what hampers the fun of Kingsroad most of all are the frequently appearing and appropriately-named Momentum roadblocks. Similar to Destiny’s Gear Score, Kingsroad tallies up the quality of all your equipment, accessories, and skills into one neat number called your Momentum Score. These pesky little digits are the cruel gatekeepers of story content, forcing you to scour the map for dull side objectives that can juice the numbers and shuffle you towards the next episode. While I’m more than happy to invest in grind-heavy games like World of Warcraft Classic and no stranger to mobile-minded progress gating, the Momentum system in Kingsroad is a particularly brutish arbiter that doesn’t allow you to get crafty or punch above your weight by taking on more challenging enemies. Instead, imposing forces appear with a skull icon over their head, their damage and health ratings untouchably high. But as soon as you inch over the Momentum line, the fight shifts dramatically in your favour. This black and white process neutralises any sense of gamesmanship, and frequently forced me into hours of toil to get back to the story I was, for the most part, enjoying. Sarah's favourite fantasy jauntsSee AllWhen you’re ready to take some time out from the combat, you can invest more in the slower-paced aspects of Kingsroad, namely the tedious Estate Management side game. As the last remaining heir to Lord Tyre, his homestead, Renan’s Rest, becomes your project. As is to be expected, helping this dilapidated village flourish rewards you with the tools necessary to beef up your arsenal, and gives you a place to spend all those resources you’ve been hoarding by completing missions – though the process of cleaning up this town is about as much fun as cleaning your actual room.While the jeweller and the forge are convenient additions that allow you to craft wearable items, the most valuable activity is embarking on gacha-based Artefact Expeditions. You’ll spend resources to hire workers and send them into the wild to find more resources, as well as historical items called Relics you can then leverage to further bolster your Momentum. Similar to other gacha game systems, you’re guaranteed a high-quality item after a set amount of runs, but a standard expedition takes eight actual hours to complete, which is a frustrating turnaround when not every run guarantees a good haul. That is, unless you’re willing to pay real money to speed things up. The Story Continues - Live Service UpdatesPlayWhile it took me roughly 60 hours to complete the story missions that were available at Game of Thrones: Kingsroad’s 1.0 launch (in part thanks to the benefit of the Ultimate Founder’s Pack code we were provided for this review), once you finish up, it doesn’t really “end” and you can seek out the plethora of side quests and repeatable combat challenges across the map. While there isn’t an official roadmap for what’s on the horizon, Netmarble announced during its 1.0 release Dev Note that the team will continue to add content and make technical improvements as time goes on. Alongside the Battle Pass, there are also timed Events that offer additional goalposts and ask you to complete a series of challenges to earn further rewards. Continued support is always good, and here’s hoping things like the floaty movement and inconsistent animations might eventually get the polish they need, but I’m skeptical that much can be done to fix Kingsroad’s biggest issues without a complete rework of its economy and progression. For example, the new quests that were already added post-launch should’ve been enticing, but instead they pushed the finish line absurdly far out of sight – by my rough estimate, I would need to play more than twice what I already have just to reach the Momentum Score required to take them on (without spending any money), and that’s despite the fact that this new content seems to follow the exact same loop of mission types already used across the rest of the campaign. Thanks, but I’m good.That brings us to the elephant in the room. Almost every activity in Kingsroad can be expedited with the use of cold hard cash, which translates to Iron Bank Marks in-game. Of course, you can pay to complete an aforementioned expedition early, or buy higher-rarity expedition wagons by the dozen that don’t take time to complete. Stuck behind a Momentum block? Just purchase Gold to speedrun your jewellery maker’s upgrades and smelt higher-rated necklaces and rings to jolt your score. Typically, you can only fast travel by making your way to a special signpost first, and there’s a copper fee for each warp – but you can fast travel from anywhere for free if you pay for the premium option. Behind nearly every aggravating system in Kingsroad is a far more user-friendly one, but only if you’re willing to cough up the dough. It seems intent to toe the line between being intentionally frustrating and passably functional, subtly egging you on to pay up rather than sit through the repetitive, time-consuming activities necessary to proceed. While it’s to be expected that there will be premium aspects in a free-to-play game available on mobile devices (in addition to Steam), the overwhelming flood of paid subscriptions, resource packs, and confounding currencies feels like a heartbreaking affront to Game of Thrones fans, like myself, who have been begging for a fully-fledged Westeros RPG similar to this. Across the 60 hours I’ve played so far, I’ve felt guilty for slashing down innocent defectors and filled with joy for feeding the starving smallfolk. It's clear Netmarble wants you to feel like you’re making a difference in this world, but it’s also just as keen to remind you that you can make a difference quicker if you’re willing to enter your credit card details first. It’s sad to see so much effort put into the underlying concept of a Game of Thrones adventure like this only for it to be tarnished by microtransactions and the repetitive gameplay loops that enable them.

In this tutorial, we implement the Agent Communication Protocol (ACP) through building a flexible, ACP-compliant messaging system in Python, leveraging Google’s Gemini API for natural language processing. Beginning with the installation and configuration of the google-generativeai library, the tutorial introduces core abstractions, message types, performatives, and the ACPMessage data class, which standardizes inter-agent communication. By defining ACPAgent and ACPMessageBroker classes, the guide demonstrates how to create, send, route, and process structured messages among multiple autonomous agents. Through clear code examples, users learn to implement querying, requesting actions, and broadcasting information, while maintaining conversation threads, acknowledgments, and error handling. import google.generativeai as genai import json import time import uuid from enum import Enum from typing import Dict, List, Any, Optional from dataclasses import dataclass, asdict GEMINI_API_KEY = "Use Your Gemini API Key" genai.configure(api_key=GEMINI_API_KEY) We import essential Python modules, ranging from JSON handling and timing to unique identifier generation and type annotations, to support a structured ACP implementation. It then retrieves the user’s Gemini API key placeholder and configures the google-generativeai client for subsequent calls to the Gemini language model. class ACPMessageType(Enum): """Standard ACP message types""" REQUEST = "request" RESPONSE = "response" INFORM = "inform" QUERY = "query" SUBSCRIBE = "subscribe" UNSUBSCRIBE = "unsubscribe" ERROR = "error" ACK = "acknowledge" The ACPMessageType enumeration defines the core message categories used in the Agent Communication Protocol, including requests, responses, informational broadcasts, queries, and control actions like subscription management, error signaling, and acknowledgments. By centralizing these message types, the protocol ensures consistent handling and routing of inter-agent communications throughout the system. class ACPPerformative(Enum): """ACP speech acts (performatives)""" TELL = "tell" ASK = "ask" REPLY = "reply" REQUEST_ACTION = "request-action" AGREE = "agree" REFUSE = "refuse" PROPOSE = "propose" ACCEPT = "accept" REJECT = "reject" The ACPPerformative enumeration captures the variety of speech acts agents can use when interacting under the ACP framework, mapping high-level intentions, such as making requests, posing questions, giving commands, or negotiating agreements, onto standardized labels. This clear taxonomy enables agents to interpret and respond to messages in contextually appropriate ways, ensuring robust and semantically rich communication. @dataclass class ACPMessage: """Agent Communication Protocol Message Structure""" message_id: str sender: str receiver: str performative: str content: Dict[str, Any] protocol: str = "ACP-1.0" conversation_id: str = None reply_to: str = None language: str = "english" encoding: str = "json" timestamp: float = None def __post_init__(self): if self.timestamp is None: self.timestamp = time.time() if self.conversation_id is None: self.conversation_id = str(uuid.uuid4()) def to_acp_format(self) -> str: """Convert to standard ACP message format""" acp_msg = { "message-id": self.message_id, "sender": self.sender, "receiver": self.receiver, "performative": self.performative, "content": self.content, "protocol": self.protocol, "conversation-id": self.conversation_id, "reply-to": self.reply_to, "language": self.language, "encoding": self.encoding, "timestamp": self.timestamp } return json.dumps(acp_msg, indent=2) @classmethod def from_acp_format(cls, acp_string: str) -> 'ACPMessage': """Parse ACP message from string format""" data = json.loads(acp_string) return cls( message_id=data["message-id"], sender=data["sender"], receiver=data["receiver"], performative=data["performative"], content=data["content"], protocol=data.get("protocol", "ACP-1.0"), conversation_id=data.get("conversation-id"), reply_to=data.get("reply-to"), language=data.get("language", "english"), encoding=data.get("encoding", "json"), timestamp=data.get("timestamp", time.time()) ) The ACPMessage data class encapsulates all the fields required for a structured ACP exchange, including identifiers, participants, performative, payload, and metadata such as protocol version, language, and timestamps. Its __post_init__ method auto-populates missing timestamp and conversation_id values, ensuring every message is uniquely tracked. Utility methods to_acp_format and from_acp_format handle serialization to and from the standardized JSON representation for seamless transmission and parsing. class ACPAgent: """Agent implementing Agent Communication Protocol""" def __init__(self, agent_id: str, name: str, capabilities: List[str]): self.agent_id = agent_id self.name = name self.capabilities = capabilities self.model = genai.GenerativeModel("gemini-1.5-flash") self.message_queue: List[ACPMessage] = [] self.subscriptions: Dict[str, List[str]] = {} self.conversations: Dict[str, List[ACPMessage]] = {} def create_message(self, receiver: str, performative: str, content: Dict[str, Any], conversation_id: str = None, reply_to: str = None) -> ACPMessage: """Create a new ACP-compliant message""" return ACPMessage( message_id=str(uuid.uuid4()), sender=self.agent_id, receiver=receiver, performative=performative, content=content, conversation_id=conversation_id, reply_to=reply_to ) def send_inform(self, receiver: str, fact: str, data: Any = None) -> ACPMessage: """Send an INFORM message (telling someone a fact)""" content = {"fact": fact, "data": data} return self.create_message(receiver, ACPPerformative.TELL.value, content) def send_query(self, receiver: str, question: str, query_type: str = "yes-no") -> ACPMessage: """Send a QUERY message (asking for information)""" content = {"question": question, "query-type": query_type} return self.create_message(receiver, ACPPerformative.ASK.value, content) def send_request(self, receiver: str, action: str, parameters: Dict = None) -> ACPMessage: """Send a REQUEST message (asking someone to perform an action)""" content = {"action": action, "parameters": parameters or {}} return self.create_message(receiver, ACPPerformative.REQUEST_ACTION.value, content) def send_reply(self, original_msg: ACPMessage, response_data: Any) -> ACPMessage: """Send a REPLY message in response to another message""" content = {"response": response_data, "original-question": original_msg.content} return self.create_message( original_msg.sender, ACPPerformative.REPLY.value, content, conversation_id=original_msg.conversation_id, reply_to=original_msg.message_id ) def process_message(self, message: ACPMessage) -> Optional[ACPMessage]: """Process incoming ACP message and generate appropriate response""" self.message_queue.append(message) conv_id = message.conversation_id if conv_id not in self.conversations: self.conversations[conv_id] = [] self.conversations[conv_id].append(message) if message.performative == ACPPerformative.ASK.value: return self._handle_query(message) elif message.performative == ACPPerformative.REQUEST_ACTION.value: return self._handle_request(message) elif message.performative == ACPPerformative.TELL.value: return self._handle_inform(message) return None def _handle_query(self, message: ACPMessage) -> ACPMessage: """Handle incoming query messages""" question = message.content.get("question", "") prompt = f"As agent {self.name} with capabilities {self.capabilities}, answer: {question}" try: response = self.model.generate_content(prompt) answer = response.text.strip() except: answer = "Unable to process query at this time" return self.send_reply(message, {"answer": answer, "confidence": 0.8}) def _handle_request(self, message: ACPMessage) -> ACPMessage: """Handle incoming action requests""" action = message.content.get("action", "") parameters = message.content.get("parameters", {}) if any(capability in action.lower() for capability in self.capabilities): result = f"Executing {action} with parameters {parameters}" status = "agreed" else: result = f"Cannot perform {action} - not in my capabilities" status = "refused" return self.send_reply(message, {"status": status, "result": result}) def _handle_inform(self, message: ACPMessage) -> Optional[ACPMessage]: """Handle incoming information messages""" fact = message.content.get("fact", "") print(f"[{self.name}] Received information: {fact}") ack_content = {"status": "received", "fact": fact} return self.create_message(message.sender, "acknowledge", ack_content, conversation_id=message.conversation_id) The ACPAgent class encapsulates an autonomous entity capable of sending, receiving, and processing ACP-compliant messages using Gemini’s language model. It manages its own message queue, conversation history, and subscriptions, and provides helper methods (send_inform, send_query, send_request, send_reply) to construct correctly formatted ACPMessage instances. Incoming messages are routed through process_message, which delegates to specialized handlers for queries, action requests, and informational messages. class ACPMessageBroker: """Message broker implementing ACP routing and delivery""" def __init__(self): self.agents: Dict[str, ACPAgent] = {} self.message_log: List[ACPMessage] = [] self.routing_table: Dict[str, str] = {} def register_agent(self, agent: ACPAgent): """Register an agent with the message broker""" self.agents[agent.agent_id] = agent self.routing_table[agent.agent_id] = "local" print(f"✓ Registered agent: {agent.name} ({agent.agent_id})") def route_message(self, message: ACPMessage) -> bool: """Route ACP message to appropriate recipient""" if message.receiver not in self.agents: print(f"✗ Receiver {message.receiver} not found") return False print(f"\n📨 ACP MESSAGE ROUTING:") print(f"From: {message.sender} → To: {message.receiver}") print(f"Performative: {message.performative}") print(f"Content: {json.dumps(message.content, indent=2)}") receiver_agent = self.agents[message.receiver] response = receiver_agent.process_message(message) self.message_log.append(message) if response: print(f"\n📤 GENERATED RESPONSE:") print(f"From: {response.sender} → To: {response.receiver}") print(f"Content: {json.dumps(response.content, indent=2)}") if response.receiver in self.agents: self.agents[response.receiver].process_message(response) self.message_log.append(response) return True def broadcast_message(self, message: ACPMessage, recipients: List[str]): """Broadcast message to multiple recipients""" for recipient in recipients: msg_copy = ACPMessage( message_id=str(uuid.uuid4()), sender=message.sender, receiver=recipient, performative=message.performative, content=message.content.copy(), conversation_id=message.conversation_id ) self.route_message(msg_copy) The ACPMessageBroker serves as the central router for ACP messages, maintaining a registry of agents and a message log. It provides methods to register agents, deliver individual messages via route_message, which handles lookup, logging, and response chaining, and to send the same message to multiple recipients with broadcast_message. def demonstrate_acp(): """Comprehensive demonstration of Agent Communication Protocol""" print("🤖 AGENT COMMUNICATION PROTOCOL (ACP) DEMONSTRATION") print("=" * 60) broker = ACPMessageBroker() researcher = ACPAgent("agent-001", "Dr. Research", ["analysis", "research", "data-processing"]) assistant = ACPAgent("agent-002", "AI Assistant", ["information", "scheduling", "communication"]) calculator = ACPAgent("agent-003", "MathBot", ["calculation", "mathematics", "computation"]) broker.register_agent(researcher) broker.register_agent(assistant) broker.register_agent(calculator) print(f"\n📋 REGISTERED AGENTS:") for agent_id, agent in broker.agents.items(): print(f" • {agent.name} ({agent_id}): {', '.join(agent.capabilities)}") print(f"\n🔬 SCENARIO 1: Information Query (ASK performative)") query_msg = assistant.send_query("agent-001", "What are the key factors in AI research?") broker.route_message(query_msg) print(f"\n🔢 SCENARIO 2: Action Request (REQUEST-ACTION performative)") calc_request = researcher.send_request("agent-003", "calculate", {"expression": "sqrt(144) + 10"}) broker.route_message(calc_request) print(f"\n📢 SCENARIO 3: Information Sharing (TELL performative)") info_msg = researcher.send_inform("agent-002", "New research paper published on quantum computing") broker.route_message(info_msg) print(f"\n📊 PROTOCOL STATISTICS:") print(f" • Total messages processed: {len(broker.message_log)}") print(f" • Active conversations: {len(set(msg.conversation_id for msg in broker.message_log))}") print(f" • Message types used: {len(set(msg.performative for msg in broker.message_log))}") print(f"\n📋 SAMPLE ACP MESSAGE FORMAT:") sample_msg = assistant.send_query("agent-001", "Sample question for format demonstration") print(sample_msg.to_acp_format()) The demonstrate_acp function orchestrates a hands-on walkthrough of the entire ACP framework: it initializes a broker and three distinct agents (Researcher, AI Assistant, and MathBot), registers them, and illustrates three key interaction scenarios, querying for information, requesting a computation, and sharing an update. After routing each message and handling responses, it prints summary statistics on the message flow. It showcases a formatted ACP message, providing users with a clear, end-to-end example of how agents communicate under the protocol. def setup_guide(): print(""" 🚀 GOOGLE COLAB SETUP GUIDE: 1. Get Gemini API Key: https://makersuite.google.com/app/apikey 2. Replace: GEMINI_API_KEY = "YOUR_ACTUAL_API_KEY" 3. Run: demonstrate_acp() 🔧 ACP PROTOCOL FEATURES: • Standardized message format with required fields • Speech act performatives (TELL, ASK, REQUEST-ACTION, etc.) • Conversation tracking and message threading • Error handling and acknowledgments • Message routing and delivery confirmation 📝 EXTEND THE PROTOCOL: ```python # Create custom agent my_agent = ACPAgent("my-001", "CustomBot", ["custom-capability"]) broker.register_agent(my_agent) # Send custom message msg = my_agent.send_query("agent-001", "Your question here") broker.route_message(msg) ``` """) if __name__ == "__main__": setup_guide() demonstrate_acp() Finally, the setup_guide function provides a quick-start reference for running the ACP demo in Google Colab, outlining how to obtain and configure your Gemini API key and invoke the demonstrate_acp routine. It also summarizes key protocol features, such as standardized message formats, performatives, and message routing. It provides a concise code snippet illustrating how to register custom agents and send tailored messages. In conclusion, this tutorial implements ACP-based multi-agent systems capable of research, computation, and collaboration tasks. The provided sample scenarios illustrate common use cases, information queries, computational requests, and fact sharing, while the broker ensures reliable message delivery and logging. Readers are encouraged to extend the framework by adding new agent capabilities, integrating domain-specific actions, or incorporating more sophisticated subscription and notification mechanisms. Download the Notebook on GitHub. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also, feel free to follow us on Twitter and don’t forget to join our 95k+ ML SubReddit and Subscribe to our Newsletter. Asif RazzaqWebsite |  + postsBioAsif Razzaq is the CEO of Marktechpost Media Inc.. As a visionary entrepreneur and engineer, Asif is committed to harnessing the potential of Artificial Intelligence for social good. His most recent endeavor is the launch of an Artificial Intelligence Media Platform, Marktechpost, which stands out for its in-depth coverage of machine learning and deep learning news that is both technically sound and easily understandable by a wide audience. The platform boasts of over 2 million monthly views, illustrating its popularity among audiences.Asif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/Yandex Releases Yambda: The World’s Largest Event Dataset to Accelerate Recommender SystemsAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/Stanford Researchers Introduced Biomni: A Biomedical AI Agent for Automation Across Diverse Tasks and Data TypesAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/DeepSeek Releases R1-0528: An Open-Source Reasoning AI Model Delivering Enhanced Math and Code Performance with Single-GPU EfficiencyAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/A Coding Guide for Building a Self-Improving AI Agent Using Google’s Gemini API with Intelligent Adaptation Features

Project Files: https://www.patreon.com/posts/130068273 . Today we are going to implement a rappel system in Unreal Engine 5. In this system, we can place objects in the level that represent rappel points and player can attach a rope/rappel onto these points and climb up or rappel down along vertical walls. When rappel up, once player reach the top of a wall and if up/forward movement input is pressed, the character will climb up the wall and stand up. If player reach the bottom of the wall, or any time at the middle, player can release the rope and fall on the ground. In the first part, we will work on the rappel point blueprint and how to attach a rope dynamically to the rappel point. And how to detach it later. ► 👇 𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐥 // 𝐁𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐀 𝐏𝐚𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐧! https://www.patreon.com/codelikeme ►Patrons will have access to project files of all the stuff I do in the channel and other extra benefits Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClb6Jh9EBV7a_Nm52Ipll_Q/join Like my facebook page for more content : https://www.facebook.com/gamedevelopersclub/ Follow me on twitter : https://twitter.com/CodeLikeMe2 Follow me on reddit : https://www.reddit.com/user/codelikeme #CodeLikeMe #unrealengine #ue5 #ue4 #indiegamedev