site banner
ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1d ago (text post)   110 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for April 7th, 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.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Still not much progress on the background generation. Mostly I've been goofing around with benchmarks, trying to see if the previous changes did actually boost performance. Indeed I'm now able to run the simulation with +/- 640K monsters at reasonable framerates (for as long as the laptop doesn't get hot), whereas previously I could only reach +/- 250K. However, this only works when I turn off the bullet simulation. It's not surprising it turned out to be a bottleneck - I basically copy pasted the monster simulation code, just to have something working for now, and I had the thought I'm doing the collision detection the wrong way around:

  • Currently for each bullet, I check if it hits any monster. There already is a spatial sorting mechanism for the monsters, so it's relatively easy to look up the ones in the neighborhood of a projectile. However, due to the nature of how they move (in a straight line, and separated from each other), each projectile is likely to have a different neighborhood, and this will cause thread divergence
  • Instead, I think I should add a similar sorting mechanism for the bullets, and check collisions from each monster to each bullet in the neighborhood. Monsters are more likely to be clumped together, so their neighborhood will be the same, and they will be doing the same lookups, and not cause any divergence. Hopefully... in theory...

That said, I'll leave that alone for now, and get back to the background generation thing.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats