site banner
ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  23d ago (text post)   302 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for April 21st, 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.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Does anyone have any pointers for getting a smooth, even finish with nitrocellulose lacquer?

I'm doing test coats and keep getting tiny bubbles.

I recently finished the fourth draft of my novel. In the next couple of weeks I'm hoping to submit the first three chapters to a competition, but I'm still not completely happy with them (particularly the first few paragraphs of the first chapter, which have been heavily revised since the third draft).

Would anyone be interested in acting as a beta reader for just the first three chapters (~5k words)?

What kind of novel is it? I'm not an editor or anything, but I read voraciously in general and 5k doesn't sound like a huge lift to read, especially by Motte standards...

I'm calling it a speculative thriller, set in the medtech industry. If you're interested feel free to DM me.

A friend built his own MMORPG about twenty years ago; it's a very lo-fi thing, a real artifact of the year 2000, but it is in fact an RPG and it does in fact have massive multiplayer capability. He's recently started reworking it, using AI to assist in development, and I've been playtesting, suggesting improvements, and working on improving the art. It's a lot of fun, and the AI's contribution to the pace of development is staggering.

My other current project is trying to figure out Unity's Behavior system for setting up npc and enemy AI, with the goal of getting functional enemies into one of my old projects.

I made some progress with the background generation, but we're not quite there yet. What's happening now is that if the player moves off the current grid cell, more cells are generated, the old cells get copied from the shader memory, and normal textures are initialized from them, and assigned to the background sprites (this is when you see them turn pink). The new cells get assigned to the texture array that sits on the shader.

I've hit some issues on the way, as expected copying the textures from the GPU to the CPU slows things down, so I spread it out over a few seconds. This probably won't be enough though, because still have to shuffle the shader texture array around (if you move off-grid to the right, each cell in the array has to be moved left, and blank ones need to be created on to the right). Doing this on the CPU won't be feasible it would require 6 more GPU-CPU copies to read them and 9 more CPU-GPU copies to set them in their new positions, so I'll try to do the whole thing on the GPU. It's a lot of pixels to copy, but it should be a lot simpler code than the bug simulation, so I'm hoping I can do it in a single frame without affecting performance.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

No tinkering this week. Work, exercise, parenting. Still, thanks for asking!

How come you're doing all that low-level graphics stuff (I'm sure there's a more precise term, but I can't find it)? Shouldn't the engine handle that for you?

I wanted to persist the dead bugs into the background, even after I respawned them. Drawing directly to the background texture seemed like a straightforward solution, then you have one background sprite that can handle an infinite amount of dead bugs, and the engine takes it from there. The basic case of a single background cell was pretty easy, it's when I wanted to handle infinite scrolling that things started getting complicated.

Now that you mention it, I wonder if there isn't a built-in way to do it in the engine. Claude offered a few alternatives, but also said my idea is pretty solid, and after I mentioned infinite scrolling, even said it's probably the best way to handle it.

Oof, I managed to finish the first draft of the chapter that I got stuck on. It will need some TLC and editing, but that's a problem for future orthoxerox. For now, I should keep on writing while I'm in the right mood.

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