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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  8d ago (text post)   397 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for September 9, 2024

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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This week I'm... Learning blender for the fourth time. It's always the worst sort of spaced repetition, I get into it for a while, then I drop it for a bit and by the time I get back I've forgotten where the auto-hotkey button is or how the heck storing multiple animations in a scene works. But it's slowly coming back to me. I'm trucking forward on the roguelike project, currently working on finalizing how some parts of the ability/in run upgrade system work. IE: Are your standard melee attacks abilities? How many abilities can the player have (Current plan is 2-4. With weapons having normal/heavy/special already, that's a lot of options even with just 2 abilities. Probably more than enough to see builds leaving behind some of their buttons.)

Anyway, today's task list is:

  1. Finish a really basic scythe heavy attack animation.
  2. Implement charged attacks, possibly as abilities, possibly as their own one-off system. Leaning towards trying to fit attacks in the ability framework atm, because I'll probably end up treating spells with windup animations very similarly to melee attacks anyway on the casting side, and it gives me trivial support for attacks having features of abilities like cooldowns, mana costs, charges, etc)
  3. Add the basic framework for out of run upgrades. Currently the plan is a sort of 'loose soulslike' sort of thing, where you start out only retaining the 'memories' (Currency equivalent to Hade's darkness) per run, and anything you can't spend is lost. Eventually you'll get upgrades to retain 5 or 10% of your total on the next run, but there's still a really strong incentive to finish each run at as high a score as possible in order to get the most permanent upgrade points, instead of abandoning runs/giving up on pushing bosses and taking resource rooms only.
  4. Add a 'melee kills with scythe grant mana on kill' out of run upgrade
  5. Implement toggled abilities (Currently only have cooldown based ones).
  6. Add a toggled point blank AoE

If I can get all that done, I'll have the second 'basic archetype' complete, a necromancer who uses scythe attacks to execute and regain mana, then spends mana on their point blank aoe for consistent damage.

My passive cooling vest project has metastasized, since I've lost access to my primary shop facility with all its wonderful free-to-me toys. Accordingly, I'm building a vacuformer, demonstrated at https://youtube.com/watch?v=RWxCvMzvxlQ . I've got parts and tools in stock, I just need to execute.

Also, Factorio is eating me again.

Also, Factorio is eating me again.

What? The expansion isn't even out yet. I've been holding out waiting for it.

We planted too many tomato plants this year (even our four-year-old has been remarking that Daddy needs to scale it back next year), and now we're canning massive amounts of strained tomato. Any tips for unusual flavor complements? We've already experimented with fresh ginger, and I'm considering picking up some fresh turmeric to try that next.

Have you tried making your own paste? I take a basket of tomatoes, cut off bad parts, quarter, squeeze out the seeds, and place on a baking sheet with a bit of olive oil. I roast them at 350 until they start browning a bit. Then I run them through a grinder with strainer attachment to get rid of the skin.

The strained pulp is poured back on the baking sheet and roasted at 350 until it thickens down to your desired thickness. I stir occasionally and push it together as it thins to minimize the amount burned at the edges. Let it cool, and scoop in tablespoon sized hemispheres on a parchment paper lined tray. Freeze. When solid, you can pop them into a freezer bag for instant use at any time in helpful tablespoon portions.

Best part of frozen paste is you can use it directly for recipes or add it with water where recipes call for sauce. I also like it as an easy way to make a pseudo-marinara by combining it 1 to 1 with ketchup and spices (garlic, onion, bit of sriracha, basil, and oregano).

Hmmm.... our freezer is pretty small, but that might be worth a try. Particularly the part about freezing small individual portions, as I've noticed in the past with the 6-ounce cans of tomato paste that it's hard for me to use up the whole 6 oz before it goes bad.

None unusual on their own, but what about a gazpacho mix? Onion and garlic powder, bell pepper powder, chives, salt and pepper.

This is the kind of question I've been turning to AIs for lately. With all those cooking and recipe websites out there they must of had a lot of training data.

These were chatGPT's suggestions (condensed):

  • Smoked Paprika
  • Fennel Seeds
  • Star Anise
  • Lemon Zest
  • Cumin and Coriander
  • Balsamic Vinegar Reduction
  • Cinnamon and Clove
  • Chili Flakes and Cocoa
  • Fresh Herbs (Basil, Thyme, Rosemary, Mint, Tarragon)

I'm not a huge fan of tomatoes, but I've always found acids to change their flavor in a way that lets me enjoy them more. So if the people around you are getting sick of tomatoes, maybe something with lemon juice or balsamic vinegar.

Do you have small cans, and a good variety of spices (from a commercial spice rack or simply self-assembled)? Just make one of each, and see how it turns out. I wouldn't imagine that cinnamon tomatoes tastes great, but I've been wrong before.

First practice of the season for the college team. It was an off campus practice and we had to share the practice with the local team. But we had three recruits show up, which is not too bad for a first night. We went out to get burgers afterwards and I bought dinner for the new players. I heard them saying they had a lot fun to each other when I was out of the conversation but not fully out of earshot.

I'm trying to reshift the priorities of the club away from travel tournaments and entirely into recruiting. We are in a precarious situation where everyone is a senior and the club is on track to dissolve next year without someone to take up the mantle. If it comes down to it I will bribe some college freshmen to do it.

@Southkraut, how's your Unreal project coming along?

Thanks for asking. As always distractions abound, and time spent on this project was little. I made some progress in debugging things, but fell into a bit of a technical rabbit hole RE: Input systems. I originally used the legacy input system because that's what the example project I used as a base shipped with, then I switched to the so-called Enhanced Input System which I'm still learning about, and at the same time I wonder whether I really need all this. Can't I just query inputs directly as I used to in Unity and Godot, without needing to go through the Editor's Project Settings? Arguably that's just me wanting to reinvent the wheel and do in code what Unreal already does in the editor, and I'd be better off learning to leverage the tools that are already before me, but I also just want to do this myself because it's easy, simple and tailored to my needs and would live entirely in the codebase instead of partially in code and partially in project settings.

The editor in general has proven more cumbersome than helpful. Whatever I need is hidden away in menus that forget which tabs I had open and other non-persistent UI elements like pop-ups or self-closing windows. Project settings, compiler results, runtime console output; it always takes multiple clicks to get at those. Maybe there are shortcuts or UI settings that remedy this.

As to my original problem of not getting the camera to show what I'm doing - I made no progress there. Please query again next week!

Fun fact, querying inputs directly in unity is no longer best practice either. You can, but they're really pushing the new input system. It's... Not terrible tbh. My main gripe with it is I don't like dealing with it's api, which you might have to if you wanna do something like 'check which button this control is in a given control scene, and display the correct image for it's key on the UI' (IE show 'E' on PC and 'X' on a controller). I wanna learn Unreal, it seems really powerful, but I gave up and decided to stick with Unity for the time being because Unreal just feels to painfully cumbersome for so many tasks. It's really studio oriented and not solo dev friendly.

Hey @ZorbaTHut, what's your stance on Input Systems in Unreal?

HighSpace

Goals for last week were:

  • Fix bugs introduced in this week

- Something weird happens when a friendly ship gets shot down causing a crash.

- Shooting down a ship does not remove it from the list of active AIs (which is why the debug aggro information is still shown after the mission, in the video above).

Fixed, and fixed. The second one was trivial, the turned out to be a faulty team-membership check resulting the AIs increasing aggro of the just destroyed friendly ship. Since the ship is completely removed from the game state, when the AIs try to chase it, they run into a null pointer, and the game crashes.

  • Reinforcement mechanics

I run into a few bugs trying to set it up, so I didn't get as far as I wanted, but I made decent progress! On an unrelated note I'm considering uploading the gameplay clips somewhere, because the file size limits on The Motte are too strict to upload anythig longer, so the end result is that it's hard tell what's going on. So to recap, from previous week we had these:

  • Player fleet approaching the enemy. There's a constant aggro factor of 50, while the final level increases as the ship approaches. When the fleet splits, the split-off Alpha wing inherits the aggro, and is detected as the ship AI should target, as it's the closest.
  • After the battle. Upon successfully destroying the enemy cruiser, Alpha wing's constant aggro factor gets increased to 60.

We take a similar setup, when the player's capital ship is parked outside, and the fighter wing heads out to meet the enemy. Because the cap-ship is within range (currently set to something ridiculous like 1 AU) it's visible in the in-mission "reinforcements" menu. From there it can be called in to join the battle. The most basic functionality works! It's not finished though. The ship is not removed from the menu after joining the battle. There's no consideration of the ship's distance from the battlefield, so it's available instantly, and it's not added to the in-mission game state, so you can't select it from the tactical view and give it commands. There's going to be a bunch of things I haven't considered, like making some moves illegal.

I did not manage to get to these at all :

  • See if there's any low-hanging fruit to make the AI more interesting.
  • More annotations / code refactoring

This week:

I have absolutely no chance to get anything done this week. This might turn out to be a busy month, but I hope I can get some work in every other week. If I manage to find some time, currently the next goal is to finish the reinforcement mechanics.

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