site banner
ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  4d ago (text post)   280 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for September 1st, 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.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I've been working on a large-scale AI map builder for Minecraft. The idea would be to efficiently create sets for Minecraft YouTube videos (ARGs, roleplays, etc.).

Surprisingly complex, requires a lot of hand-holding on my part to get even SOTA AIs to build anything remotely appealing. I think a truly complete version of this project will require an AI that interfaces with Minecraft the way current agentic AIs interface with code. It will need to use all sorts of shortcuts, like using a bash command to spawn a sphere of b size at x, y, z rather than actually placing the blocks manually.

Since that's out of scope for me I think my next step is to try to build some kind of ThreeJS-Minecraft translator, since AIs seem to be able to build pretty good ThreeJS maps.

After playing around the flipbooks from FC, I ended up scrapping the shader-based explosions. I really like playing with shaders, but sampling a texture is way easier and more performant, so there's no justification for doing it procedurally.

So I refactored the projectile material - originally it had a single texture with various projectile types, and I'd sample the correct one based on the type stored in the current particle, but I noticed that uniforms (shader variables that can be imported from "outside" / the scene editor) accept arrays, so each type will have it's own texture, and I won't have to worry about differing frame counts between types.

One thing I still need to do is add another transition to the grenade. If I play the whole animation when it's in the exploding state, it'll keep killing the monsters way longer than warranted, so I want to split the animation, and play the latter "smoke cloud" part in a special state where collision detection is turned off.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Not a ton. Been slightly sick, but not sick enough to skip work, so tired as all hell in the evenings. Mostly just did a little debugging, cleaned up some code, tried to fix a handful of bugs but didn't really get far. Some more worldbuilding, but there again I mostly just cleaned up earlier writing, fixed some bugs (physically implausible planetology, mostly), and added nothing new. Took some very quick design notes on NPC scripting, but it's still vague and it remains to be seen how much of it will survive prototyping.

It's been a slow week.

This last week has been mostly AI work, setting up shell mechanics for my tank project.

  • Safety classifiers are exceedingly frustrating, and combined with the AI's verbosity in commenting code resulted in a situation where the AI effectively poisoned itself, writing a bunch of files individually which, when loaded into context simultaneously, dropped the safety locks like a guillotine. I think I've cleaned up most of it, but it's still a pain. Projectile and armor mechanics look good, and I've got a start on internal component damage; still need fires and ammo rack explosions.

  • I've upgraded my bespoke-GURPS-Vehicles-2nd-Edition weapons and ammo pipeline, and I'm working on implementing various weapons and turrets; the next goal is a loadout menu where you pick weapons, equipment and components to take into battle. AI enemies, improved gun/explosion effects, and a light-baking/environment pass are in the hopper.

  • The social situation is dire. I'm making vastly better progress than I have in years, with a level of effort that feels entirely sustainable... But discussing classifier woes and the HE shell breakthrough with one friend led to him deploying snark, quitting the group chat, and a 24-hour communications blackout. Another friend was like "hey, cool stuff, but maybe don't show this to anyone in the (other) groupchat, they hate AI and anyone that uses it." The latter reaction is hardly unexpected, since I've lurked long enough to know that this was the firm group consensus and there's zero point challenging it, but... At some point, it would be nice to have some form of human connection outside my immediate family not rigorously policed for conformity to alien dogma. The general Artist position on AI is a skin of intellectually-bankrupt blather on top of an ocean of naked self-interest, but goddamn will they crucify you if you cross them on it in any way.

Are you telling me that GURPS is so realistic, it triggers antiterrorism safeguards? I think SJ games needs to advertise with that.

You know the story about GURPS Cyberpunk and the Secret Service, right?

Sadly, I lost my copy of Vehicles (2nd edition) on a Canadian bus trip in the early 2000s, so I'm stuck getting Claude to write me something similar by trial and error. Things Claude has argued are true:

  • With the projectile and powder charge held constant, shortening a cannon barrel increases chamber pressure.
  • Shell walls need to be extra thick to survive, unsupported, max chamber pressure being applied to them, or they'll deform laterally.
  • The best way to simulate shell fragmentation is to build from scratch a geometric model of the shell casing, rederived from the shell and filler mass values.
    Fixing any of these is fraught, as the code is still triggering classifier safety lockdowns when I try to load it into context. Fixing that and further debugging the shell/gun stat calculators is my current goal.

The general Artist position on AI is a skin of intellectually-bankrupt blather on top of an ocean of naked self-interest

I actually thought they'd be a fair bit more self-interested, and suddenly find it fine and dandy when it's the code monkeys that are getting replaced, so kudos for consistency, I guess.

Safety classifiers are exceedingly frustrating

Can you post (or DM, if you prefer) some of the text that's been tripping it up? It started as a gimmick, but I have a system prompt that gives me feedback on how much thought-crime I'm committing, and why it's considered a thought crime. It doesn't have much use other than making me giggle, but I thought it might actually be useful for getting around the safeties, and wanted to put it to a test.

Also a general thought: if you can actually get working code, I think you could solo-dev a pretty kickass game. I really liked the writing you did for HighSpace, and since you're an artist, there's not much more you'd need.

Can you post (or DM, if you prefer) some of the text that's been tripping it up?

DM sent with a link for a bunch of the scripts!

And yeah, I love making this stuff. Did the guy who was going to do writing for HighSpace ever get any writing done? Because I started writing up my own ideas for a version of it based on setting stuff you'd mentioned, plus some stellar megastructure ideas. Come to think of it, I'm wasting Midjourney credits at the moment, I should try burning some to illustrate that idea...

Nah, never heard from him again, though I can hardly judge, given that I put the project on the back-burner myself. I wonder if that project wasn't too ambitious... and whether it's a lot more reachable given AI...

I've upgraded my bespoke-GURPS-Vehicles-2nd-Edition

Did they ever do a Vehicles 4th edition?

At some point, it would be nice to have some form of human connection outside my immediate family not rigorously policed for conformity to alien dogma. The general Artist position on AI is a skin of intellectually-bankrupt blather on top of an ocean of naked self-interest, but goddamn will they crucify you if you cross them on it in any way.

Yes, I find this very frustrating also. I am coming around to using AI for developmental editing and beta-reading and finding better and better ways to use it for things like compiling a series bible and tracking plot threads and other very useful writing research tasks. I feel like many authors could use this, and I'm about qualified to teach a class on it. But hell if I'm going to suggest it at a writer's conference or a convention- I might as well take the wrong side on Israel/Palestine or trans rights.

Did they ever do a Vehicles [Third Edition for GURPS] Fourth Edition?

As I have mentioned previously:

Allegedly, GURPS Vehicles Third Edition [for GURPS Fourth Edition] will be published sometime soon—albeit independently by Pulver and with the serial numbers filed off, since Steve Jackson Games can't spare the money to edit it even though it's already largely complete.

Figures. GURPS has been on life support for a long time now.

(But at least it's still alive, unlike In Nomine.)

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats