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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  7d ago (text post)   180 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for December 30, 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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Had a busy New Years but I managed to get some work in. The latest version of the app is deployed, but it didn't quite go without a hitch, as I had to scramble to fix some issues stemming from discrepancies between sqlite and mysql. But it works!. The old data is migrated, and everything else works pretty damn snappy. I have to decide what to do next, either I'll go back to importing data from Substack, which is what got interrupted before I went on this whole refactoring tangent, or I'll add some AI-automated tagging, and/or image description for categorization and easier search, which is what I found myself wishing for recently.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Happy new Year Arjin!

I made good use of the holidays and really got to grips with procedural geometry. I now have subdivided icospheres which I can freely sculpt and paint via code. They don't look like much yet; I still need to write tools for the sculpting and painting, and creative logic that actually uses those tools, and some assets (chiefly shaders) that make them look like I want them to look. But the foundation is laid, and works, and actually works a whole lot faster than what I had in other engines. C++ has its advantages.

Originally I had planned, at this stage, to get into variable resolution meshes, but I'm postponing that for the time being. I would need it for realistic-scale planets, but it's a big technical rabbithole, and I just come climbing out of one those, and I know myself - I will sink months into it with nothing to show for it until it's completely done. So instead, I'll scale the planet down for the time being.

Which means that my next immediate tasks are

  1. Write some tools and creative logic to sculpt & paint some placeholder terrain.
  2. Make sure the terrain works nicely with collisions and physics.

So that I can actually make some things happen.

Other technical rabbit-holes I need to take care not to fall into:

  • Data-driven terrain
  • Simulated planetology
  • Premature performance optimization

But generally speaking, I'm happy. Things work.

I plan them, I implement, I debug furiously, and then they work. Life is good.

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