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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1mo ago (text post)   420 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for March 17, 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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I played around with @PokerPirate's idea shutting off the lighting for dead bugs, the effect is indeed interesting, but the issue is that (Go/)Redot gives me no control over the draw order of particles from the shader program, and the dead mosnters often end up covering up the live ones. So I started working on the cleanup program (shown after the fade-through at the 12s mark), and the effect is a lot more legible. The dying monsters go "light out", and then disappear, and are respawned.

I also added a kill counter (so far only in the window title bar on top), and I think it exposed the issue with the respawn system. I noticed that as time goes on, the kill rate seems to be increasing, and the number of bugs visible goes down. I think what's happening is that since the coordinates the bug is respawned at are time-based, several of them die at the same time, they get spawned at the exact same spot. I also think the collision detection ignores this scenario to avoid division by zero issues, so they just continue simultaneously existing in the same spot. Next step is to sort it out, and hopefully have a working system to permanently render the dead bugs to the background.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Oooh, I remember not having control about the render order of particles in Godot.

Good thing I switched to Unreal!

...where I also don't have that.

I'm about halfway through recording myself reading my novel aloud, listening back to it and line-editing. Using this method, I have already cut out about 3.5k words.

A couple thousand words away from finishing my second novel (Xianxia series called Between Beast and Buddha). Looks like it's gonna clock in at just shy of 200k words. A bit meandering in places, and darker in tone than the first. I'm a little too close to the work to have an objective opinion on it yet, but I'm mostly satisfied, it's a necessary part of the story I set out to tell. Reader reception has been mostly good, but I'm not sure how the ending will land.

I really should get back to editing the first one. It would be nice to finally officially be able to say I have a book out there, instead of explaining web serials every time someone asks me about it at a party.

How long was your first?

It is currently 142,448 words, pending a little bit of churn from ongoing edits.

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