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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1mo ago (text post)   388 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for April 14th, 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 got back to working on handling of the background textures, and a lot of the time was spent debugging... which with shaders is tricky. No debugger, no text output, so you're left with translating variables into something visual, and playing divide-and-conquer games with your own code. The issue was that the texture immediately under the player worked fine, and the dying bugs got rendered to it, but the ones surrounding couldn't properly calculate the relative coordinates of the bug, and in the end everything was always rendered out of bounds (i.e. not rendered). It turned out to be a stupid copy-paste error where I was using the wrong variable, but the good news is that it works now.

Now I'm trying to handle the player moving around. If you go leftward and leave the background texture immediately behind you, the textures to the right should unload, and new ones to the left should be created (and if you come back, the old textures should be reloaded). Related to this, I'm wondering how to manage memory issues. If the background textures are small, it's easy to zoom out far enough that no background is visible. If they're big they eat up quite a bit of memory (and still don't necessarily cover the whole screen). I found out it's possible to create a compressed Rendering Device texture, and that the compression is quite good on them, but these are read-only. So the current plan is to read the background texture being unloaded from the GPU, create a compressed texture from it, and keep it on the more distant background sprites. After that I might add a second layer of storage, where they get saved to the hard drive, and reloaded as needed.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

I continued on trying to reconcile space and ground. Which seemed to work out, except for some rendering issues, and weird performance drops. But then I suddenly started getting unpredictable full machine freezes and even bluescreens. I'm not sure what's causing those - maybe related to the performance issues I ended up unable to diagnose because Unreal's profiling workflow is, to say the least, not newbie-friendly. But for now I'm trying to think of a way to diagnose and fix that before it grills my machine, because I can't afford a replacement.

It's increasingly looking like just starting over from scratch, but I'm not quite ready to pull that trigger yet.

I hoped to finish my one-handed novelette over Lent but failed to do so. My NAS that contained the draft died on me twice, which provided me with an excuse not to finish anything, but the real reason was writer's block. One scene wasn't coming out the way I wanted because one of the characters refused to behave the way I needed her. This comment is my external motivator to finish the scene.

This comment is my external motivator to finish the scene.

Would you like a weekly ping like I do for Southkraut?

For which I remain grateful.

Thanks, but I've found that a voiced promise is already enough for me.

What's a one-handed novelette?

Smut that is longer than a short story, but shorter than a novella.

Thank you. I had a much more innocent interpretation of the adjective "one-handed". I thought it might be a form of constrained writing in which one can only use the keys on one side of the keyboard. Bless my foolish heart.

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