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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  2d ago (text post)   234 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.

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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.

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