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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  26d ago (text post)   414 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for April 28th, 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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Yes, I've been making extensive use of GPT 5.4 through Github Copilot. It's been working quite well for most things.

  • It helped me a lot of getting a handle on various Unreal systems, including procedural geometry.
  • I told it to create a mechanism for measuring game performance and shutting it down if CPU and/or memory use get out of hand, to prevent freezes. It did, and I had no complaints about it.
  • I told it to write a script to automatically start the game after each prompt to validate that it still runs. It did, and even uses it semi-reliably, and when it doesn't then a quick reminder prompt is enough to get it going. Also refined that approach with copilot-readable logging. The latest addition was taking screenshots at regular intervals for the copilot to inspect, which almost works: It requires the manual step of me dragging them into the chat window.

And, latest item

  • It actually did fix the atmosphere rendering! Took several days and dozens of different angles to finally get at it, but it works now.

So yeah, AI is a pretty powerful tool for this. It just takes so much refactoring to keep the codebase in a good state when the AI has zero qualms about writing a million lines for each little fix I request, and a lot of attention to keep it from breaking things on the way.

Next up, why did my background stars particle system stop working? I'll probably bang my head against that one for a while, too.

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