pruning #gamedev

communicating with a rust program using the networking features in the game's scripting language. rust generates a save file (also we have a real save file format now!) and serves it over localhost, and a user program in the game requests and loads it in a loop. #gamedev

'traditional polys' vs new rendering technique that involves doing raycasting & shading on the CPU and rendering 'splats', quads on GPU. rays work great with simple shapes (i.e. voxels), and doing lighting CPU-side could allow for more interesting lighting effects. also, it looks cool #gamedev

for the dynamic memory allocator for my game, i'm testing bucketing the allocation sizes using the floating point exponent & mantissa. it's all basic bit math, so it's really quick and requires no memory reads. each bucket has its own free list, so best-fit allocation is O(1). #gamedev #programming

every typographer makes the same joke in every publication about typography and it makes me laugh every time

i've seen a lot of interesting abbreviations of common programming terms (e.g. 'fun' for 'function' in go), but this abbreviation for 'method' takes the cake

javascript is a great game engine, actually

interesting #webdev thing today: i love JSX syntax but i don't want to bundle a runtime, so I wrote a custom parser that transpiles jsx to native DOM calls. I wrote it as a vite plugin; only 138 lines of code! no error reporting, but otherwise feature rich, and zero (really zero!) overhead.

has google just stopped showing results for anyone else?

Apple docs: "yeah totally, you can pass nil. it'll just autofill the data for you. no problem dude" Apple validation layers: "what the fuck. why would you pass nil. what is wrong with you"

the game's scripting language can now download files! you can import and run code, fetch html, or even read the weather. it uses a poll system & you basically have to roll your own poll loop (but there is one in the stdlib). internally, it uses the OS' networking tools (had to do some objc lol)

Wrote a custom cross-platform GPU API for my game's engine, so now it can directly speak both Metal and Vulkan through the same rendering code. The new API is designed to be super low-overhead: it doesn't allocate memory or do any hidden work. Here's a (slightly boring...) demo! #gamedev #techart

After 9 months, I'm cutting the raytracing-based voxel renderer for my game and going back to basic meshing. (I'll have to do a post-mortem on why raytracing was a horrible idea!!) Anyway, here's a visualization for some basic voxel meshing stuff #gamedev

they'll do anything before they bring back skeuomorphism

me when i ignore my own comment

he's a dog, and he plays basketball. so simple, and yet so deeply complex

quick note: i've put a bunch of my game development screenshots & videos at aaaa.sh/creatures in case people want to take a look at what i've been working on without scrolling through here #gamedev

just finished reading "The Elements of Typographic Style" by Robert Bringhurst; it was one of the most well-written textbooks I've ever read! here are some of my favorite excerpts #design #typography

man i really went from "yeah i think it would be fun to make video games" to "HOLY SHIT WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN X PRIME AND X PRIME PRIME" real quick #gamedev

found a problem with my game today :) i wanted to stress-test the collision detection & gravity routines by spawning a ton of objects, turns out the bottleneck is rendering! each object caries with it a huge amount of rendering overhead, so the game slows to a crawl... (-̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥᷄_-̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥᷅ ) (1/N) #gamedev

i often find myself writing tiny visualizers for chunk metadata, so i added a really simple debug menu that gives me all the info i need. it's also a good test of keyboard navigation support for my immgui system. #gamedev

objects have gravity! movement is based on the center of mass, which has to be updated as objects are modified. now it's time for collision detection... ( ⚆ _ ⚆ ) #gamedev

testing gravity! i wanted mario galaxy-style gravity, but galaxy actually uses hand-shaped 'gravity zones.' because everything in my game is modifiable, i had to define gravity on arbitrary shapes. tried a couple techniques, but i think this one's a winner! pls ignore the graphics bugs :) #gamedev

LOOK MOM I'M FAMOUS!!!

as a big fan of ‪@jendrikillner's graphics programming weekly articles, i'm so happy to see MY dda article featured!!! i'm glad people are liking the article, hopefully i can make more in the future as i work on more of the math for my game (*^▽^*)ゞ #gamedev

thought the way this comment was laid out was cool and I wanted to share #programming #gamedev

oh shit he getting jiggy with it

#gamedev i will NOT rathole on ui. i will NOT rathole on ui. i will NOT rathole on ui. ... okay but what if we did procedural animation on icons by defining them with bezier curves and what if we invented a compact binary format for the paths and hold on lemme make a path editor in HTML real quic-

#gamedev trying to polish the scripting debugger up to a release-able level. focusing on showing the impact of each command. it's useful for debugging, but i'm also using this as a test to establish a visual language for entire game's UI. it's a nice creative break from all the pure-tech work!

here's a random walker for generating random worlds! using this to stress-test the renderer & physics engine. #gamedev

improved my game's FORTH-based scripting language with a debugger! it runs in a VM, & debug symbols are based on the word that's being processed when a given instruction is written. it supports step-in and step-over. (kinda ugly tho, maybe next i'll work on that long-overdue UI overhaul...) #gamedev

line drawing! it's not much, but it's been super helpful for debugging. lines are grouped into "gizmos", which have an immediate mode draw API. you can choose how long the gizmos will last and set a delay on how long it will take them to appear, which is useful for sequential algorithms. #gamedev

was going through my old math notes to send stuff to a friend and i found this gem

UI system! an immediate mode gui, written from scratch in my engine. currently implemented this for debugging purposes, but it's what i want to use for the final game. #gamedev

today i decided to add 'rounded rectangles with drop shadows' to my engine, and after hours of researching people's techniques, i've discovered you absolutely can spend too way much time on rounded rectangles

really happy with the integration of screen space reflection into my game. water feels much more like... water... #gamedev #ScreenshotSaturday

rendergraph has been fully integrated into the graphics engine! the entire game's render pipeline, including buffers, inputs, outputs, and draws, is now described in a single function that reaches to a simple graph API. this allows for super quick iteration on graphics code for the game.

sometimes in graphics programming you're looking at something with well-rendered colors, lighting, and shapes, and you're like ehhh... not quite right. and sometimes you're changing things at a much lower level and you're able to boot to a yellow square and it's like (╯°□°)╯ FUCK YEAH THAT WOKED

horny ass linux user

something interesting from today, used #neovim to write a quick search function specifically for #odinlang symbols in a file. helps with jumping through a file with many functions & types. it's built on nvim-telescope so there's search, preview, and syntax highlighting. ~73 lines of lua code total!

working on a render graph for my handmade game and i used mermaidjs to write a super simple graph renderer for debugging purposes. here's the full graph! notice we aren't compositing ui with the final pass rn (°ー°〃) #gamedev #vulkan #techart

the “you’re fired” guy??

this is what the RADICAL LEFT wants to do to your masculinity /s

*really* small update, but i smoothed out the edges of the blocks so now they look a little more life-like. I did this by blurring the parts of the normal buffer with low depth, so there's no performance penalty to voxel raytracing

writing all graphics stuff from scratch ( #vulkan ) is super rewarding and so powerful but it can be super tedious a lot of the time. it's not just shader code, it's all the code that *describes* to the computer how you want to run the code. and everything is spread around the codebase :( #gamedev

doing research the ui for my game and i'm realizing how absolutely *gorgeous* the ui for dreams ps4 is. matches so well with the game's painterly aesthetic but feels lively and aligns with the game's ethos. mediamolecule is just really great at everything