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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  11d ago (text post)   354 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for August 25th, 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 have been eyeballs-deep in Claude Code, getting it to write me a single-player ripoff of War Thunder so I can play with the tanks I've been modelling lately. Two nights in a row, I've managed to trip the AI safeties and trigger a lockdown due to excessive discussion of, ahem, internal ballistics, significant pressure events, and spallation scenarios. Claude says I shouldn't work on the project in automatic mode, so now I'm stuck manually approving tool calls like some sort of peasant.

...It's a shame, too. The discussion was legitimately stimulating; the sycophancy is easy enough to look past, and Claude's simulacrum of knowledge is broad enough that it trips the insight porn feeling while discussing artillery and its effects on armor. I'm using this for something I've got a moderate knowledge base for and a lifelong interest in, but something that's sort of bounded, focused on a specific project of limited scope. I got the equivalent of three or four serious motte comments out of it before the safeties chopped the convo, and really enjoyed modelling its "thinking" and framing arguments in reply. I can see how this would really do a number on someone who turned it loose in their actual life, started asking it for advice, bouncing ideas off it... AI psychosis or whatever we're calling it feels significantly more relatable after a couple weeks working with it.

What pricing, tooling and workflow do you use?

Have you used Github Copilot? If so, how do the two compare?

I'm doing the hundred bucks a month level. Tooling... pretty much none. I had Claude itself set up the project, and implemented a couple simple rules for handling Git. Workflow is that I describe what I want it to do and it does it, generally pretty well, occasionally with some bugs that need to be teased out.

...I feel like this is not a very useful answer, but it's how it's been going. I've used it to build a ballistics bench that calculates/extrapolates gun and shell stats from a few minimal initial parameters, set up a pipeline to store the data in spreadsheets, import the data back into the bench, and auto-generate prefabs based on the data. I'd previously coded raycast-based hit detection for shells, but it's expanded that to allow sequential penetrations, penetration based on shell velocity, velocity loss when penetrating, spalling/fragmentation, HE shells and fragmentation (this is the point that seems to be tripping its safeties), simple damage visualization to crew and components, armor values stored as textures, and Blender tooling to make building assets easier. It's helping me set up a breath-of-the-wild-style grass shader. I'm hoping it can handle the back-end of UI setup and enemy AI as well.

I haven't used git copilot. I might at some point, but Claude's monopolizing my time currently.

HE shells and fragmentation (this is the point that seems to be tripping its safeties)

I had a few western models nope out on generating a logo, presumably because of the title. They also didn't like depicting a corpse of an unfortunate bloke that the aliens got to. Thankfully the Chinese did a good job without complaining.

Thanks. The answer is perfectly useful.

What kind of tech stack are you using for your project?

Unity3d version 6-something, Blender for modelling, photoshop for image editing, Claude for coding. unity code is written in c# (what I used before AI) and blender uses python.

How is Unity 6, compared to earlier versions, if you have also used those?

I haven't really noticed much difference between the versions. I've been working with it daily for over a decade, but most of that time I was working almost exclusively on the art end, and only dipping into unity to integrate assets, and on that end it hasn't really changed much. I'm currently trying to learn more about the systems, and overall it seems pretty great!

The scare awhile back where the CEO floated screwing with the licensing terms sucked hard and I considered switching engines, but I still use this one for work and all my old projects are on it, so for now I'm soldiering on.

I added collision detection with the player, and the grenade launcher. One thing I didn't like about the latter was the look of the shockwave / explosion was pretty ugly when it got big, as the sprite was only 64x64. I didn't like the idea of shoving a bigger texture into the particle system either, but then it hit me - why not use shaders here as well? Still haven't settled on anything, but initial results are promising. Might even change all projectiles (with the exception of the grenades) to be shader based.

How are you doing @Southkraut, still on vacation?

Vacation is over, and a good thing too.

Mostly did worldbuilding since then. As always, it pretty much does itself - it's all flow, zero conscious effort. I also did a little coding here and there, mostly relating to decorating the first-person map with props, but it doesn't quite work yet. The main issue seems to be that structures composed of multiple meshes are only instantiated as one giant cube. I blame this on a handful of methods that I let GPT-5.4 write for me because I thought them sizable but trivial, which I didn't review properly. My bad. I'm glad at this point that I was strict on architecture, and it's easy to isolate the offending logic. Just need to get around to actually debugging it.

the look of the shockwave / explosion was pretty ugly when it got big

No offense, but it still looks heavily pixelated. I assume that's still Work In Progress?

No offense, but it still looks heavily pixelated. I assume that's still Work In Progress?

Including the ones in the later parts of the video? It has 3 explosion types: 1 texture-based, and 2 shader-based.

Sorry, I thought the video was looping after the cut, and closed it too early.

No, the shader-based ones do in fact look a lot better!

In fact, they look a little too smooth; it doesn't quite fit the style of the sprites. Not sure what to do about it though (short of using high-res textures); I'm a complete zero when it comes to visual design.

Thanks for the hint, I saw some people doing cartoony shaders, maybe I'll give a few of those a shot.

I'm a complete zero when it comes to visual design.

Same... to the point where I'm often oblivious to issues until someone shows me a better version.

Can shaders handle flipbook animation? That second explosion effect is a huge improvement, but flipbooks allow much higher fidelity. Here's a bunch Unity published for free.

If you are sticking specifically with procedural shaders and image-based flipbooks are out, there should be a bunch of ways to add fidelity to the effect. it looks kinda like a gradient scrolling outward from a polar coordinate + Perlin clouds to add detail, + alpha on a gradient or curve for the dissipation effect?

  • clustering smaller particles on top of your big one should be a cheap, easy way to add detail. color-shift them to simulate smoke or debris?
  • the big explosion looks a bit weird, because it dissipates from the center a bit early and very strongly, and the overall duration of the blast seems a bit short for its size, and the explosion expansion seems linear rather than a sharp spike and then longer tail falloff as it dissipates.

Here's a random example, note how the explosion happens in two frames, and then the dissipation happens in three? Initial blast should be violent, and then the fadeout should be slower.

For the dissipation, look up how dissolve shaders work, and I think that's the sort of effect you want: your image turns transparent, starting with the darker pixels, and moving up to the lighter pixels; it works really well with Perlin noise to give more organic fadeout.

Can shaders handle flipbook animation?

They can, you just move the UV coordinates by particle lifetime. It's how I handled everything originally, including the monster animations. I was a bit hesitant to just throw a higher fidelity images at it to mind the resource use, but it looks like an entire flipbook from your link is like 4MB, so it should be fine. I'll play around with these.

That second explosion effect is a huge improvement, but flipbooks allow much higher fidelity.

You mean the second out of the 3, or the second shader effect (so third out 3)?

Technically shaders give you "infinite" fidelity, the limiting factor is the screen resolution (and much later, if you keep zooming in, floating point precision). That said I'm surprised how far a few extra pixels will get you. My textures were 64x64, these ones seem to be around 400x400, and look decent even at high zoom.

it looks kinda like a gradient scrolling outward from a polar coordinate + Perlin clouds to add detail, + alpha on a gradient or curve for the dissipation effect?

Sounds about right. The main effect I lifted from here, it does use perlin noise from what I can tell, and I used the smoothstep function to add the dissipation.

clustering smaller particles on top of your big one should be a cheap, easy way to add detail. color-shift them to simulate smoke or debris?

Huh, wasn't sure this was even possible, as I'm not doing this the standard way - since the main simulation (including projectiles, collisions, etc) also happens on a shader, it would be too costly to pass the results to standard scene nodes. I basically have to hack the particle system, and if I can't program it there, it would be too much trouble. Good news Godot seems to have an emit_subparticle function for it's particle shaders, so this should be doable. I'll give it a go.

Here's a random example,

Did you forget to paste a link by any chance?

Anyway, thanks for all the hints man!

yup, sorry, here ya go

for bright particles generally, check out additive, screen and multiply shader effects. not sure how your engine handles or names those, but it ought to have some analog for them, and they're essential for doing bright effects like explosions, fire and sparks.

Also, I meant the second explosion. third one would look cool if you can get a lightning effect stacked on it.

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