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 -
I managed to get to the bottom of the performance issue from last week. As suspected it turned out to be the clean-up code, where the dead bugs never actually get cleaned up, and instead get rendered to the background texture forever. As more of them die, the more of them get rendered each frame, so performance drops. After fixing it, the basic game loop is playable sustainably at 100K+ monsters, so all is well.
I managed to figure out how to beat AI into submission. It turns out that providing a reference image solves the perspective issue. When I just uploaded the old retro sprite, said "this is a sprite I'm using, can you make a similar one, but better" it does the job pretty well (1, 2, 3). It doesn't stray from the form of the reference very far, even if I tell it to go wild, but that makes sense, since this is probably the same thing that is keeping the perspective in place.
I even got it to do decent animations! This was a bit of a trip, though. I'm not very good at describing what I want, so I first got an AI to write a prompt for the video-gen AI to make a natural looking "walking animation" and to explain that this is for a sprite, so the creature shouldn't actually move. I supplied the latter AI with a sprite from the previous step, and the generated prompt, and the result looks decent. The death animation was trickier, as I wanted something "splatty", but it kept making the splatter fly off screen. "Keep everything in frame" didn't work, so I figured maybe I should provide it with a final frame as another reference. I took the final frame of the animation where it flew too far, and went to an image-gen to clean it up. Took a few tries as it also didn't understand "keep the splatter within frame", but it did grok "make it as though the splatter exploded at lower velocity, and stayed close to the body". Don't know if it's "low velocity" or "close to the body", but it worked. So now back to the video-gen I provided it with the cleaned up final frame, and... while it did use it correctly, it still made the bug projectile-vomit blood off-frame. Thankfully modifying the video prompt to also include "low velocity" / "close to the body" splatter, actually got me what I wanted. I got the best results with Seedance, other models tended to do weird morphing effects I that had nothing to do with the prompt. Anyway, now I have to rescale, and cut up the animations to make them usable, but that should be pretty easy.
Finally, I started adding new weapons. Hans, get ze flammenwerfer!
How have you been doing @Southkraut?
Not much progress this week. It was hot, so I spent pretty much all of my free time in the public pool, trying to get in a few seconds of exercise in between long sessions of dad time.
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