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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  13d ago (text post)   386 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for June 30th, 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 cut up the animations, and replaced the old spritesheets... I feel ambivalent about the results. I'm not sure how to describe my issue, on one hand it's kinda what I was aiming for, but the old sprites, despite their lower quality somehow felt more defined or something. I'll try to see if adding extra frames to make the animations feel smoother helps, but I'm getting the feeling that this is where the art of sprite creation lies, and it might not be that easy to get what you want with AI slop.

Other than that I fixed the bullet-firing algo a bit, allowing for finer control of RPS fired, and firing multiple rounds in a single frame, which helped to make the flamethrower more dense. I also fixed a pseudo-random number generator in the shader code, because the old one could only return one unique value per frame, and was degrading after a few minutes, always returning the same value. This also improved the flamethrower aesthetics.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Removed some more AI-generated code and/or replaced it with my own. This especially includes terrain generation. Did some refactors to replace basic C++ classes with Unreal Objects, and raw pointers with Unreal-managed smart pointers, especially where I want to support serialization (which is just about everywhere). Then upgraded to UE 5.8, which took some doing to get everything to build again.

Then I went on to make some models in Blender. I quickly realized, however, that it would take a bit of a workflow to get those rigged and imported into Unreal. And I am doing very, very primitive low-fi, low-poly models that mostly consist of geometric primitives. So I checked and...I should be able to do that directly in the Unreal Editor. Haven't gotten around to actually trying it yet, but for my use-case that seems like the simplest solution.

Okay so I'm moving into a new house with a lot more smart home shit. What's the most util maxxing smart home stuff you can think of? I'm already on board with adding either a moisture sensor or a rainfall meter to my home sprinkler setup to avoid overwatering.

I'm planning to add emergency water main valve shutoff as well if leaks are detected under one of the five sinks we have.

What else?

Internal home surveillance system that does continuous object tracking so we can tell where the kids left orange teddy bear?

I'm planning to add emergency water main valve shutoff as well if leaks are detected under one of the five sinks we have.

I'd highly recommend putting one in your water heater closet too

The water shutoff and sensors systems are a lot nicer than expected.

I'm not getting this exact system, but I wouldn't be sad if I did.

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