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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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?
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.
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