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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1mo ago (text post)   479 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for February 10, 2026

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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Alright, the little buggers are moving!

Next step is getting bullets to do something to them. Collision detection and setting some internal state flag should be easy enough, but I want to do some post-death processing which might get tricky. As this is all done on the GPU, and GPU's don't like cores branching off in their logic I was trying to figure out a neat way to sort all the dead entities, so they can be handled in bulk. There currently is a system in place that divides the space into a grid, and sorts the critters by the cell they're occupying. The current plan is to use that by adding an virtual grid space, that corresponds to the alive/dead state rather than current coordinates, so the already existing sorting mechanism can group them together and they can be processed in bulk. Let's see if it pans out.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Regressions. Regressions! My star particle system looks about how I want it to...but it doesn't loop. The settings say it should. Another particle system that uses almost the exact same setup does loop. But for some reason my stars go out and don't come back on again. Very annoying. Similarly, my Unreal brand SkyAtmosphere, which handles atmospheric scattering etc., stopped showing up for work. It does become visible when I manually toggle its visibility on and off in the editor, but for some reason I cannot fathom, it stopped working when coming out of programmatic construction.

Luckily neither of those are critical. Unluckily I am very bad at moving on. I'm trying to force myself to focus on other things until a solution comes to me, but I constantly find myself fiddling with those two regressions again. Things aren't allowed to just break like that!

I tried my hand at making a VN. Got really obsessed with an idea for a couple of weeks in January, filled my Obsidian with all sorts of notes.

Observation #1: Messing around with Ren'Py is more fun than writing. I had to stop and force myself to write.

Observation #2: I have no idea how long a single scene should be. I have an idea how long something should be in prose, I have an idea how long a "words-words-words" VN scene should be when I'm playing it, but now when I'm writing one.

Observation #3: I hate editing. I love well-edited prose, but I hate editing. It's like doing a complex Katamino puzzle and having to remove multiple pieces, except worse, because I'm a shape rotator, not a wordcel at all. Editing when I can't just eyeball the text is even harder.

Observation #4: I have no idea what goes in the middle. After editing the first few scenes I realized I have a very good idea what the first act will look like, what the third act will look like, but only a vague idea of what will happen in the second act.

The VN is now on hold. I'll keep it running in the background, jotting down more act 2 ideas until they start coalescing into an actual plot. In the meanwhile, I'll switch to another idea of mine, which is just pure prose. Hopefully, I'll find it easier to edit.

In case anybody else got really confused: VNs are probably "visual novels". If you're still confused, you're not alone, so link. Ren'Py is an engine runs the text/visuals/buttons and helps construct scenes.

VNs are probably "visual novels"

VNs are definitely "visual novels"!

About two-thirds of the way through my fourth draft and I've cut about 8k words.

The size of the standard plyo box (20x24x30" or 50x60x75cm) is annoying. You can almost make one out of a single sheet of plywood, which is 60x60" or 1500x1500mm (technically, 1525x1525mm, but inches are 25mm sharp in my workshop), but no, you can only make one that's 18x24x30", or 45x60x75cm.

a single sheet of plywood, which is 60x60"

What kind of plywood are you buying? I've always seen them 4'x8', which is easily big enough to make that box.

18mm, plywood usually comes in 1525x1525 sheets in Russia. 1220x2440mm is also present, but why buy a bigger one?

More fun with box dimensions (20″ × 24″ × 32″ ≈ 1/4 m3 = "size A2")

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