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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  18d ago (text post)   471 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for March 24, 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, drawing dead bugs to the background is working out pretty well. One touch I decided to add was to tone down the light-sensitivity of the background texture, this way the bugs that are still alive stand out more, but the background still get the cool light-cone effect. Now I'm working on expanding it to cover a wider area. In theory I could just throw a bigger texture at it, but I was thinking of splitting the background into a grid, and only sending the textures close to the player to the shader program. This way the background could theoretically have an infinite map.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

I've been seeing really poor performance lately, lots of low framerates. I thought that was just background processes slowing me down (OS + Rider + UE5 + the game all together eating most of my RAM with little margin to spare for anything else that pops up). But no, it's consistent. In Unity I'd just open the builtin profiler and tell it to give me a full breakdown of code performance. In Godot I'd attach Visual Studio's profiler and do the same. And in Unreal...I despair. Apparently my two options are "just print how long a given part of code takes to execute, lol" and "run two additional applications in parallel to capture performance reports for an attached unreal editor or game", and then they give me a thousand-item list of everything the engine does, and tell me nothing at all about how my code performs. Coincidentally, trying to monitor my code's performance via Rider doesn't work, and I don't yet know why.

I'm sure there's a way to do this. I can't imagine that other devs just do without measuring code-side performance. Or is everyone else using blueprints only? I doubt it.

I am finally writing my trip report to China. There is so much ground to cover and things to discuss that I have barely described my first 2-and-a-half days in the country and the word count is 6,571, somewhere about half the word count of my entire Vietnam trip report. This is going to take forever to write, and I've already cut out a ton of interesting historical detours and personal musings I could have written about.

I'm curious if it would be better to post here in instalments (say, one post per city, four posts in total) or in one go. With the level of detail I'm going into, a full post is going to be somewhere around 36,000 words.

Installments, please.

Have mercy on my attention span.

Installments, for sure. If it was good enough for Dickens and Dumas, it is not such a terrible idea :)

I would love to see serial publications come back in. It's the engine that drives all the wildly popular Japanese stuff: manga and web novels are the source of everything and both are serialised. Main downside is that most of them don't have a planned ending and just die or decay into reruns.

Seconded doing it in instalments. You can use our comments as feedback when you're compiling a second draft which combines all four into a single post/article.

I think installments would probably generate better discussion if they are in depth enough.

  1. I'm happy to announce that my first PR was merged into TheMotte's codebase - link formatting buttons are now available in the comment editors. I plan to take on a few of the outstanding issues in the following weeks :)

  2. Does anyone know which image generation models have reliable inpainting? Gemini claims to have it in Nano Banana, but the results look... less than stellar. Specifically, (by request of a family member, ah the curse of being "good with computers") I have a group photo of people + one person separately, and I want to compose the one person onto the group photo, and change everyone's clothes into magnate garb. Everything I've tried so far fucks up the faces at least a little bit, making one or more people unrecognizable. Which again, wouldn't be a problem if I had access to inpainting, because then I could just add the original face to the intermediate result, but the generation then changes and screws up some other part in turn.

Completed the fourth draft of my novel on Sunday. It's just shy of 96k words, about 17k shorter than the third draft and, I think, much stronger for it.

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