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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  21d ago (text post)   402 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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Alright, I mostly figured out the background thing. One the player moves to another background cell, the dead bugs are copied to a standard texture, and the GPU texture array gets rearranged so that the movement is seamless (which you can see by the background color changing, but the bugs that got rendered into the background staying in place). It seems to work well and reasonably fast (not counting the first time it's triggered, which I'm hoping to get around by pre-triggering it when the game loads). Now the only thing missing is reloading the "standard" textures into the GPU when the player comes back to a previously visited cell.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Been banging my head against my ever-intractable problem with Unreal's sky-atmosphere system. Namely, that ever since I succeeded in procedurally generating an atmosphere once, it hasn't worked again since. It just won't show up visually, it's greyed out in the scene graph, and nothing I do seems to change that. One more point in favor of starting over from scratch, I guess - too much messy, hard-to-maintain code from me learning how to do Unreal in the first place. But I also don't want to keep reinventing the wheel - if I start over now, then I'll probably just run into the same kind of trouble again sooner or later. So maybe I should do a lot of refactoring and get my codebase in order instead.

...have you tried asking AI?

I've been thinking for the last year or two that I needed to start engaging with AI more, but wasn't really sure how to get stuck in. I was attempting to google a blocking issue on one of my unity projects, and accidentally clicked on the AI summary result at the top... and the AI summary was extremely helpful, and got me past the problem in short order. Since then, I've been turning to it faster and faster when hitting weird blocker issues, and it has one- or two-shotted them every time so far, usually just by providing context to highlight the issue I'm blind to.

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.

AI is still at the state where it will sometimes confidently tell you something completely wrong, and yet for simple blocker issues this is still immensely helpful, because you can just try out what it told you, and 90% of the time you get to declare victory, and the other 10% you're just back where you started.

In fact, there's a bit of grey area in between - twice recently I've seen an AI come up with a solution which was definitely wrong or incomplete in some way, but which was much easier to fix than solving the problem from scratch would have been.

For complex issues and design issues, AI can easily paint you into a corner by generating reams of redundant/spaghetti/inflexible code that solves your immediate problem but is unmaintainable in the long run, but in general it's getting better so fast that I'm not sure how long this warning will be necessary.

32725 words, and I am getting close to the end of the first draft. Writing has been consuming almost all of my free time since I broke through that one scene that was blocking me.

I have already jotted down the outlines for two smaller sequels and a completely different story, but I need to fully finish this one first. Unfinished works don't count!

Unfinished works don't count!

What matters is the journey, not the destination. Among non-professionally-published literary works, I think it's very possible that I've enjoyed more incomplete ones than complete ones.

I didn't think about serialized works when I wrote this. I meant unfinished as in something you don't think is ready to be published.

When it's a draft in your desk drawer, you can always tell yourself you can make it better. When it's out there and at least one other unrelated person has read it, you know how good or bad it is.

Still working on learning Unity's new behavior system. Currently trying to figure out why it doesn't want to add new enum variables to the blackboard.

When I started this thread I thought we could use it to help each other troubleshoot issues like this, but it's been so long since I did anything in Unity, I have no idea what you're talking about. Hopefully someone else can jump in.

It's all good, got it figured out last night. Now, if I could just get the kiddos to sleep through the night so I could script in peace...

Are you out of unity for good then?

Yeah, at least for 2D stuff, Go/Re-dot seems like it's more than enough. Last I tried anything 3D it felt a bit wonky (a bit like 3DS vs. Blender), so I'm not sure about that part of it yet.

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