This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Alright! Even though I could spend some time cleaning up the code, it seems to be mostly working the way I want, and it's 2x faster than the retarded version (and that's with the dev database which is basically empty). At some point I'll try to find a way to make either even more efficient or more readable, but I'm pretty satisfied at the moment. Just have to fix one or two more bugs that came up, which will be my task for this week.
How are you doing @Southkraut?
Also, @FCfromSSC, you never asked me for a ping, but if you don't mind, I'm curious about your Blender adventures.
Blender Adventures: I had a low-poly machine pistol model I was working on, an original design of my own. I've been working on a high-poly model to do the full texturing workflow, and got bogged down learning sub-D best practices on a detail-heavy helical magazine. That's pretty well done at this point, but I think I'm going to need to learn retopo and sculpting for the grip, and how to do clean intersecting curves in geometry for the complicated suppressor design. All of that's been on break for the last few weeks; while I'm teaching drawing lessons and a bible class at a Christian summer camp. I'm back home this weekend, and should be back to Blender shenanigans next week, doing retopo for the grip and getting into blender sculpting.
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Played around some more with physical movement in Unreal. Figured out the algebra for it, wired it all up, and I think it downright works. I am making boxes float and point at each other and jink sideways pretty much as inteded. So long as they don't bang into obstacles and end up going into spins. I'll need to add some kind of self-righting behavior, too.
So I added guns to the boxes, and allowed them to fire those as soon as they're pointing at the enemy box. And that didn't work at all. First off the guns are the wrong size and in the wrong place (some kind of relative transform issue?), they don't follow their parent box (parenting doesn't work like I think it does?), and when they fire the guns, the bullets have the same problems of wrong size, wrong place, and not actually moving. Also, when I attach the same gun to my player character, it just gets catapulted all over the map (collision resolution?).
So, yeah. Not exactly hyperrealistic drone warfare, and not exactly working.
Edit: Fixed what I thought was a parenting issue. Turns out that while you can apply physical forces to MeshComponents, doing so will move that component instead of the actor it is attached to. Applying that same force to a CollisionComponent instead will actually move the actor itself.
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Not much progress on either project. Kids up my ass too much and summer heat slowing things down.
TRON bike lighting
My work area for this is outside, which is problematic because whenever I do work up the energy to do stuff on this it's too hot out. So, right now I'm setting up a desk inside of the house for it still.
Homies: Ride or Die
Decided to try to make the skydome better and also try other car models.
Attached a pic with the Dodge Charger Daytona swapped out for a 2025 Ford Mustang GTB (or whatever). Also tried integrating the Shanghai skyline. Looks washed out. I think it's because the skyline is an HDR image but my pipeline is linear color.
/images/17526947480673697.webp
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Last Friday I read the first draft of my NaNoWriMo project, which I completed at the very end of May and didn't look at for six weeks.
It's... decent. The story is coherent and I think the characters are believable. Right now, I think the main thing that's holding it back is pacing. It's broken up into five acts: I think the first, fourth and fifth are quite strong and very readable, whereas the second act is a little slow, and the third needs to be edited quite heavily to add in a new "hook" that only occurred to me after completing the first draft. Additionally, at the end of the fourth act and the start of the fifth act there are three very long chapters back to back at which the pace grinds to a halt, which I need to cut down very dramatically so the pacing doesn't flag too much.
On Sunday I began work on the second draft, chopping down the first with a goal of removing (per Stephen King's writing advice) at least ten per cent of the total word count. This has not been challenging at all: by the time I finished work on Sunday, the combined word count of the first and second acts was already 24% shorter than the equivalent word count in the first draft (I even cut an entire chapter from the second act I didn't think added much). I've been really enjoying the process. Once I've finished cutting stuff out, I'm going to add in some ideas I had since completing the first draft, again with the goal of my second draft being no longer than 90% of the first draft's word count (preferably shorter). Then and only then will I let someone other than me look at it.
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