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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  2d ago (text post)   189 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for October 14, 2025

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

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Still refactoring. The content import seems to be working and is a lot cleaner now than it used to be. If all goes well it will even be able to serve all other content sources (Substack, Youtube, etc.) without further modification. I'm currently rewriting the frontend to work with the new data structure, and with any luck I won't be needing separate components for each source either.

I also took a small detour. The database grew a bit over the months and I started noticing the app isn't as fast as it used to be. Turned out that some things I thought I'm handling in bulk ended up being translated into individual queries, some indexes I could swear I set up weren't actually there, and I somehow slept through recursive queries, which I've been dreaming of having for a while, actually becoming available nearly a decade ago. Oh well.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Fairly well, actually. Stole some minutes here and there and managed to discover that one of my greatest sources of consternation - my actors spawning in at (0,0,0) instead of wherever I nominally put them - was because immediately after spawning them, I programmatically assigned a new rootcomponents to them. Now, I expected the rootcomponents to assume the position of the actor, given the methods and parameters with which I attached them...but it's the other way around. So it goes.

Now my remaining issues revolve around the physics.

  1. Why do some of my actors collide with the terrain, while others fall through?
  2. Why do my actors constantly and rapidly accelerate in unpredictable directions?

And when I get a handle on that, I'm on to the somewhat more freeform

  1. What's the best way to attach to physically simulated actors together, given my use cases?

Why do my actors constantly and rapidly accelerate in unpredictable directions?

This is usually because they were spawned partly in an object / terrain, right? The physics engine prevents clipping and collisions by producing a force to push the offending objects apart, but if the objects intersect too badly this force can be huge and sends it off into space. Most obvious when you spawn an object intersecting terrain, b/c terrain doesn't move and objects go flying.

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