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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  17d ago (text post)   391 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for May 26th, 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 promised to get to and finish the big scene by this thread, but I haven't finished it. I'm still in the first... third? of the big scene, 41111 words in total. At least the end is in sight, and I'll be able to switch to editing soon.

This novelette is approaching novel-length.

It is. I think it will be 48k by the time I finish the first draft. Don't know what the final size will be, I guess something around 55k. Some of the earlier scenes could benefit from being less IKEA-like.

On my tank game, I got a simple grenade-throwing enemy working using unity's Behavior system, my collaborator got his messaging system working, and we got a bunch of old systems cleaned up and working properly again. He's working on engine and transmission mechanics, while I've had to hop over to another project where I'm trying to build a pixel-art environment tile set for another collaborator's RPG. After much experimentation for painting techniques for high-detail pixel art, I caved and got myself a midjourney subscription. The plan is currently to use midjourney to generate chunks of terrain detail, which I will then cut out into raw sprites. I will then clean up and normalize these to remove generation artifacts and inconsistencies, then use them to assemble the final terrain sprites. So far, it's working pretty well, and is the first time I've used AI for serious art production.

@Southkraut, @ArjinFerman, how go the projects?

All of my tinkering time went into that trans post, so didn't get anywhere this week.

I do have a question though - you have any recommendations for AI tools? I'm currently using an open source / creative commons sprite sheet. I tried creating something fancier recently, but when I tried asking for a spritesheet it tended to spit out the same kind of retro style that I was trying to upgrade from, and when I asked for an animation that I could later turn into a spritesheet, it would do goofy stuff like get out of the sprite bounds... Any hints?

damn opsec....

I'm currently using Midjourney, and I'm only just dipping my toes in the shallow end. Here's what I've learned so far:

Midjourney does not seem capable of generating a clean sprite sheet, nor tiling textures. If there's a way to do it, I haven't found it yet. What I have been able to do is to generate good-looking pixel-art images of terrain, then chop chunks out of that terrain and compile them into a sheet of raw chunks. My plan is to process these chunks using photoshop magic (desaturate to greyscale, clamp number of colors to a small value, gradient map to recolor with a consistent pallete) and possibly some cleanup by hand to eliminate rendering artifacts and inconsistencies in the chunks, and then use the chunks like lego pieces to assemble production-quality sprites. Creating tiling textures is fairly trivial in photoshop using filter > other > offset and fill > content-aware or minor editing.

I've started experimenting with re-rendering of images I've painted myself, but so far the results have been unusable. I think this is probably just lack of knowledge on my part, so I'm gonna keep digging on it.

I've also started testing generation of monster sprites. So far the results for that have also been unusable, but did have some interesting bits. I'm hoping the re-rendering might help a lot here if I can get it working properly.

You got some examples of the kind of pixel art you're going for? any details on the sorts of sprites you're trying to make?

Well, this is the spritesheet I'm using right now (or rather, the 3rd and 5th rows, as it's all from the top-down perspective, and I just rotate the sprites). Here's one I found for the marine / player character, and this is the style I'd like to go for. Not necessarily realistic, but not the retro-RPG cartoonish style either. Something "serious" / played straight, someting fitting for a sci-fi / horror. Honestly, the typical AI-slop style would even work for me, I thought, but the issue is it doesn't understand the assignment. I ask for top-down view, and it gives me a perspective view. If I specifically ask for a sprite, I get something closer to what I need, but then it reverts to the retro/cartoon style I want to avoid... I ask it for a transparent background, and it just draws checkers in the background... and that's without bringing up the animations.

On the other hand it did make me a pretty kick-ass logo.

It's not so important right now, either way. Perfectly happy to use the retro-RPG one as a placeholder, and when I'm done with the thing I can comission someone, but since you mentioned actually using AI for your project, I thought I'd ask if there's a better way to use it, than what I was doing.

DM me the prompt you're using to try for enemies?

Partially provoked by the fact that Github Copilot is going to become almost prohibitively more expensive to use (I paid 10€ for what github tells me will cost 200€ from June onwards), and partially because the Copilot was unable to cope with the growing complexity of the project, I decided a few weeks ago to restructure the codebase and my workflow to mostly go back to the pre-copilot days of me doing the coding, but especially the structural design of the code, myself. Vibe coding was great to make things happen without knowing in advance how to get Unreal Engine to do what I wanted, but it turned out to be really damn bad for maintainability. I've always had a sort of cartographic understanding of code, carefully shaping it to be visually intuitive to grasp, and taking great pains to make sure naming and hierarchies made it easy to traverse. But of course the LLM agent does not, does not need to, and has a hard time replicating that even if I try to tell it to (which might be poor prompting on my part). So right now I'm doing the utterly unpleasant work of going through the tens of thousands of lines written by the LLM to roughly hammer them into a shape that corporeal old me can make sense of. Long overdue I suppose.

As so often, this presents me with the same dilemma I've mentioned several times before - is it better to do all this review, refactoring, cleanup and correction work, or should I just start over? Sunk costs on the one hand, along with a big dose of "It's time to buckle down and get something done; if you keep starting over you'll never see results!". But on the other hand, the codebase is a mess and I do now have a much better understanding of the Engine and of how to use (and especially how not to use) LLM agents, and a fresh start might actually be a lot faster if I can salvage some of the more hard-won functionalities like the procedural meshes or my physical-entity-framework.

Another issue I have right now is that I apparently botched my project's upgrade from UE 5.4 to 5.7. I followed the documentation on how to upgrade, but now I can't open the project in the Unreal Editor anymore because apparently some modules haven't been fully upgraded, and attempting to upgrade them fails. Hm. On the one hand, this might be fate pointing me towards a fresh start. On the other hand, if this happens again in the future, I can't start over every time!

Issues like these make me think of going back to Unity, that simpler world of yesteryear, where I had everything under control. But then I think of the strange directions the Unity Engine has been going, and I recall Zorba's words on the topic of comparing game engines.

Because this thread is Deadsville, and because I was talking about it earlier, let me dive a little deeper into my first impressions now that I've installed and used Bazzite for a little bit.

First off, the good:

  • The desktop isn't fucking Cosmic. I could say a Lot about this, and maybe I should, but for all its (alleged) strengths, Cosmic has been a massive headache for me as a desktop. Granted, it might well be better with a fresh install, but I still think it's inexcusable that my desktop session can slowly grow to hog all of my available system memory, which is a particular WTF given that it's written in bloody Rust of all things (please, potential Rustaceans, I am well aware that it's not the fault of Rust, that the coders are Doing It Wrong, because of course they are, that's what fucking happens when coders have the option to create unsafe blocks of code as opposed to getting gud at Rust), silently fail to black screen when Dumb Shit happens like power saving overriding an active full-screen game, be bad at keeping screen settings for modern games, generally, and not just with Steam games either, create both graphical and alphanumerical screen glitches with alarming regularity, along with countless other small annoyances like the file manager not properly dealing with MTP devices, leading to my need to use the Gnome Files app to be able to copy shit to my phone. I'll take Gnome back over this mess any day of the week.
  • It's container based. 'Nuff said.
  • It speaks volumes to me that I spent ~4x longer waiting for the stock Windoze install to copy off onto a backup drive than I did installing Bazzite and getting it off the ground. Moreover, after getting over my Linux-land autism (see the Meh, below), said install was quick and easy-peasy compared to all of the hoops I'd have to jump through to get to a Win 11 desktop like tell it not to "help" me by tracking everyfucking thing I do and driving the point home by going and telling it everywhere else to kindly shove its telemetry crap right up its /dev/null, let alone the extra crap I'd have to do in order to avoid creating a Microsoft account. For bonus points, it's not shoving Copilot down my throat either. Fuck you, Micro$oft, in particular for unleashing that fresh new hell upon your users, especially the ones with <16G of system memory and/or the ones that don't want a bloody Microsoft account.
  • Speaking of installation, installing ollama and oss-gpt:20b for teh lulz was painless as well and fun for five minutes or so. Now to mess with it in detail...
  • And speaking of ollama, Bazzite handled going with my iGPU for display flawlessly, letting the dedicated GPU do its LLM thang right out of the box, or at least AFAICT. Will have to try switching to a game and using a port on the GPU to see what kind of an impact that has, some time...

The Meh:

  • BTRFS -- Seriously, has this actually, finally, gotten to be decent? I wanted to believe in BTRFS around about a decade ago, but as it languished in its half-baked state, I eventually gave up on it and moved back to XFS or ZFS, depending. The last thing I wanted to do when I was installing Bazzite was to dick around with doing my own system partitions and file systems by hand, so I ultimately rolled with it, but it still seems a little slow to boot up after POST compared to the last-gen system that I'm writing this on.
  • The Bazaar -- not bad, but pretty sparse compared to the OOB software available in most Ubuntu-based distros.
  • OpenRPG is (still) a PITA--not really Bazzite's fault, per se, but they're pimping it out in the bazaar, the bastards.
  • Flatpaks -- again, not Bazzite specific, and I understand why they're the New Hotness, but they can still be a PITA as often as not, too.
  • Steam -- I get why it's here by default, I'm not mad, and I may even go back down that road some day in the not too distant future, but for now stop popping up a bloody login screen every time I fire up the desktop! I'd like to keep my old pusher at arm's length if I can, pls, kthxbai

The Bad:

  • Lack of desktop options -- If left to my own devices, and all other distros being equal, I probably would have tried Hyprland, but for now I've got enough stuff to worry about without tinkering with another desktop. Again.
  • The learning curve -- The last time I was using a Red Hat based Linux distro with any regularity, Firefox was still easily the best browser around, so there are going to be places where I have to slap my own forehead and go finding the right switches to add to dnf to make it Do Right as opposed to the much-more familiar apt or even dpkg. Guess we'll see how that goes.

And that's all that I can think of for now. I've rambled on for long enough, but my goal here is to play around with it for the next couple of weeks and see what works well, what crashes, and what havoc I can wreak with it, so I might just have more to say next week!

one of us, one of us

Agreed on a lot of the annoyances, especially flatpaks and various Bazaars. My experience is that BTRFS is genuinely good enough as long as you never need to get to the partition from a Windows boot, but I haven't pushed to many edge cases. Hyprland isn't that rough to learn, but it's still something new (not helped by three different config revisions in a year!), especially if you ever switch to something else and back.

My experience is that BTRFS is genuinely good enough as long as you never need to get to the partition from a Windows boot, but I haven't pushed to many edge cases.

Thank you kindly, the only way Windoze is going back on this hardware (assuming I keep it, which isn't quite a given just yet) is if there's some must-play game that Bazzite-flavored Lutris/Proton (and maybe Heroic...?) can't handle, and I'll be all too happy to annihilate that bridge if and when I come to it. In the meantime, I feel a lot better about not going to great lengths to set up a non-standard FS, and will get back to installing other llms and maybe kicking the tires on Bluetooth 5.4 to see how well Bazzite handles multiple Bluetooth devices at once...

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