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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  7d ago (text post)   Edited 4hr ago   415 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for July 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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I finished the changes in the bullet-monster, and monster-monster collisions. The latter isn't particularly visible, but it could occasionally happen that a bullet could travel deep into a group of monsters, bypassing the first few lines, and this has been somewhat mitigated now. The latter can be seen by collisions becoming more "fluid". I uploaded a new video, it should be higher quality than the last one (though you might need to manually change the settings on Rumble). I also refactored the way the monster size is handled. It used to be split across several variables, and at the end of the day it was impossible to tell what the final size will end up being. I'm now able to determine both the sprite size, and collision size, in absolute units, so that makes things a whole lot easier.

The original Alien Phobia game had two more weapons types, a grenade launcher, and explosive bullets, which I want to implement now. I'm not sure if the latter one will work out, but it's essentially the same mechanic for both, so I'll give a go.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Stuck to my plan and dug into migrating my UI from Slate (declarative syntax in C++) to UMG / blueprint widgets (visual programming). It's directly contrary to my usual way of doing things, but I also figure that my usual way of doing things is not the best when there's a What-you-see-is-what-you-get alternative. I'm not all the way done yet; had a lot of figuring out to do, and there's sitll some things that don't work like I want them to, and there's some things that are now halfway in C++ and halfway in blueprints, which I think have to be improved by moving them over all the way, but I'm making steady progress.

It used to be split across several variables, and at the end of the day it was impossible to tell what the final size will end up being. I'm now able to determine both the sprite size, and collision size, in absolute units, so that makes things a whole lot easier.

This makes me happy. I always get antsy when variables are interdependent.

This makes me happy. I always get antsy when variables are interdependent

The worst part was that Go/Redot made particle size dependent on their sprite size. I thought there'd be no practical way out of that one, because even if I wanted to fix it in the shader code, I'd have to figure out the sprite size first to normalize the particle. Then I had an epiphany, and figured I can just clamp the local vertex coordinates to (-1;-1), and (1;1), and then scale it to the desired size.

After a rewrite of that fucked up open source library, I shaved 30% off the time it takes to complete a unit of work with only the most obvious, non-retarded way of doing things. Completely gutted all the Windows WPF primitives (point, rect, vector, enums for pen configurations, etc), replaced them with SkiaSharp primitives where absolutely necessary since the renderer is SkiaSharp. Left the raw data in it's native format for the entire processing pipeline, convert it to screen units only at the last second by bit shifting things on a range of 0-4095 to pixels on a range of 0-255. x >> 4 mother fuckers, who needs endless double precision division operations?

For my next trick I need to create a dedicated, single threaded synchronization context with an OpenGL context it owns to asynchronously handle the rendering tasks from other threads. I would hope that knocks another 50% or more off the unit of work time.

Don't know why anyone would have AI do this for them. It's so much fun.

I got punked so badly mixing opengl and threads. My own application was consistent but GPU drivers on some platforms crash if you make GL calls from any thread except for the first one. I think macos has additional annoying constraints.

I've successfully made a second, much higher quality mod for Rimworld. It adds 19 new guns, half of them railguns.

I really like railguns, okay?

But then I branched out and added cased telescoped ammo, ETC weaponry, 2 40k Bolters, a laser rifle (where's the rifling?), a plasma gun, a 25mm smart grenade launcher, and a 20mm infantry autocannon. Why? Because it's my mod and I do what I like.

I can already notice the massive leap in capabilities in less than a year of AI development. The LLMs of 8-9 months ago were inadequate for making a niche mod without an enormous amount of hand holding. The last time, I caved, and just did the XML work myself, and used AI images that I wasn't quite happy with.

This time? 5.6 Sol did pretty much everything I asked of it, with some mandatory manual testing to find and share errors and balance issues. It took me several days to implement the 4 weapons I'd made last time, in half the hours, I made 19, of significantly higher quality in all regards. I even managed to create brand new types of ammo, which I never managed to get the hang of last time. The art is far, far better. 🅱️ anilla Rimworld has art of the quality you'd expect at a special needs art therapy session, so it's not like it's hard to do better.

All I had to do was guide the overall design, use my knowledge of existing mods to direct the model to find out the poorly documented little extras or tacit knowledge that it wouldn't know, and make sure nothing was glaringly broken. Along the way, it even managed to troubleshoot and fix a 450 mod Rimworld map-gen issue, which the models of last year could not do.

It was fun, albeit tiring. I intend to add more guns, and now that I know it can handle more ambitious challenges, turrets, guided projectiles, and pretty much anything else I'm willing to burn time and tokens on.

Predictably, this caused drama on the modding discord. I was expecting it. I told the modder with a fetish for fetish art in the thumbnails of completely unrelated mods to go fuck himself, or thereabouts. I'm making free content, and it's good stuff. End of line.

I've also noticed Opus 5 has improved even since the last big jump in November. It's seriously impressive now: I give it a task and it does it, writes good tests and makes them pass, all on its own. I'm writing barely anything by hand, although still read its output and ask for refactors, because I'm still noticing subtle mistakes (maybe all spec issues, my fault, but still) and redundancies (definitely not spec).

My moral principle is that publishing AI content is good, as long as it's disclosed and you avoid places that explicitly disallow it. Don't be one of those assholes that pastes obvious LLM output saying everything is 100% human, just state upfront "I used AI because I wouldn't have made it otherwise".

I say nothing at all on the matter. The mod is exactly as advertised: it adds a bunch of guns to Rimworld. The guns function, and look good. It is immaterial to me how such a product comes into existence, as long as it does what it says on the tin. God knows I wouldn't have bothered to make anything of that scope if I had to do it all manually. I could, it's not impossible, and I've made one mod on my own, but something like this wouldn't happen.

While my novel draft is marinating, I decided to write a short story in the same genre. Turns out, I am incapable of brevity. How hard can it be to make the protagonist walk in on an intercourse-in-progress with a predictable outcome? Turns out, it's really damn hard! For me, at least. Surely some exposition is necessary, so you sneak in one expository scene, then another, then you end up designing whole expository sex scenes just to keep the reader entertained till you get to the good stuff. I'll have to edit like eighty percent of it out.

Speaking of editing, while writing the short story I've realized I've been insufficiently consistent with my points of view in the novel. It's usually written with a single POV per scene, but some scenes utilize omniscient narration, which feels like head hopping. I insert a dinkus every time I have to switch the point of view mid-chapter, but this clearly doesn't work when it's two people hashing out their relationship status.

I find you need to match the number of ideas you're treating to the length of whatever you're writing. Microfiction can sustain one idea per story. Short stories several. Too few ideas and you won't have anything to work with. Too many and you won't be able to provide a solid basis for them and you'll have trouble with any sort of depth or believability. Or you'll just overshoot your desired length altogether and wind up with a project you didn't choose.

Turns out, it's really damn hard!

Look at that, you accidentally wrote something you can reuse as a line of dialogue.

I've realized I've been insufficiently consistent with my points of view in the novel. It's usually written with a single POV per scene, but some scenes utilize omniscient narration, which feels like head hopping. I insert a dinkus every time I have to switch the point of view mid-chapter, but this clearly doesn't work when it's two people hashing out their relationship status.

How Not to Write a Novel has an entire section about this, highly recommended.

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