Foundations - Learning Graphics Programming with the Zig Programming language

[delicate delta]

this looks better

I think

no

[delicate delta]

maybe

fuck it

I'm going to make a rotation matrix use it to transform the normals and rotate it using imgur controls until it looks right

with no tangents how am I supposed to use a normal map 🤔

I'm sampling from a height map to get the vertex y offset

I am not going to spend hours of effort on this learning scene

to filter the height map into proper normals, I am going to try this shortcut

it should look like this

[delicate delta]

that looks correct

idk

let's try it

I did a non uniform scale on the terrain, that's why

[ivory verge]

https://tenor.com/view/bait-thats-bait-tom-hardy-mad-max-gif-5055384

[ivory verge]

you should show the wireframe 😛

and how tesselation is doing its majeek

[delicate delta]

let me try

[ivory verge]

im sitting in a room flooded by sunlight atm, with the shades down too 😄

[delicate delta]

lol

pretty happy with it how it turned out, although the journey was fraught

there's a LOD exercise left

then I'm done with the tessellation chapter, after that is the geometry stage

I need to get sleep though

3:30 am lol

the geometry chapter looks pretty uninteresting tbh, I will do it though

[ivory verge]

now i can see it a bit better, but, its just wireframe no lod from tesselation yet, neh?

[delicate delta]

no lod yeah

that's tomorrow

I realized my bittangent is wrong in that video

I fixed it though

ok really going to bed

[ivory verge]

https://tenor.com/view/good-night-goodnight-sweet-dreams-goodnight-sweet-dreams-good-night-and-sweet-dreams-gif-11361991370639169383

[delicate delta]

kind of fun to play with light attenuation with the moon terrain

[ivory verge]

that does look neat indeed

[delicate delta]

I was going to add shadows

but it's too much work

I want to set up the texture sampler array approach you suggested

before I do that

it's just too many samplers otherwise

@ivory verge can you please pin your message 🙏 #1248864886772072591 message

thank you

[ivory verge]

i was hoping you checked what i actually have pinned 😄

[delicate delta]

oh

lol

[delicate delta]

thanks

I have to do that at some point

[delicate delta]

man

man this moon terrain is giving me a tiny game idea

I think I have an even better idea for a game now that's even smaller in scope

this is pretty cool

ya

this is a better game

I can't stop playing with this scene

[delicate delta]

idk

some kind of coordinate system issue

it's also super noticeable even without wireframe

well when moving

I'm not sure the author intended for it to look smooth when moving a camera

I don't like the tessellation shader

cannot see the vertex outs

in renderdoc

oh

I could do this differently than the book and do the LOD in the vertex shader tbh

then I could see what it's doing

no I can't actually do it there I need multiple vertices

[delicate delta]

lol

coderabbitai has a better LOD than what was in my book

https://github.com/btipling/foundations/pull/40#discussion_r1808054976

uniform float u_DetailLevel;
uniform vec3 u_CameraPosition;

void main(void)
{
    float distance = distance(gl_in[gl_InvocationID].gl_Position.xyz, u_CameraPosition);
    float tessLevel = max(2.0, min(64.0, u_DetailLevel / distance));
    
    gl_TessLevelOuter[0] = tessLevel;
    gl_TessLevelOuter[1] = tessLevel;
    gl_TessLevelOuter[2] = tessLevel;
    gl_TessLevelOuter[3] = tessLevel;
    gl_TessLevelInner[0] = tessLevel;
    gl_TessLevelInner[1] = tessLevel;

    // Pass through vertex data
    gl_out[gl_InvocationID].gl_Position = gl_in[gl_InvocationID].gl_Position;
}

that's a much better idea

[delicate delta]

less buggy

kind of cool looking

can't even tell lol

hrm

I think the change is too great

between patches

I need more patches

[delicate delta]

that's better

still noticable

idk

definitely better than completely broken

this is locked to origin just to see what it looks like

[wild ember]

This looks great TBH

[delicate delta]

thank you, it uses camera position and distance, I think that would be ok if I cull to the view frustum in a real map in a real game so that I don't include all the geometry out of view that might be LOD 0 right behind the camera

[ivory verge]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ9cKxWvwkw

the frog who made this is also on the server

[wild ember]

How are you transitioning between lods? is it continuous?

[delicate delta]

i attempted continuous. I tried to make it more continuous by increasing the patches and creating a finer grained function that would produce a continuous lod

I think I have a lot to learn on how to do that better.

The lod has some variables, patch count. Instance count, a detail constant in my tessellation control shader and the distance from camera

[wild ember]

What I do is squish alternating edges together as you get far away so that the patches match the next patch, so you don't see sharp transitions

[delicate delta]

That’s cool I think that’s something I could try

[wild ember]

so... are you gonna make the moon... spherical?

or perhaps an.. oblate spheroid?

[delicate delta]

this is just all from a book

that I'm following along to learn with

although I improved on what the book says to do or change it to make it work in my zig x up LH system

I think I will have a moon like satellite in my game though as the main area of the game

[wild ember]

will you be able to go to the moon?

[delicate delta]

it's all on the moon, although not our moon

have you read vernor vinge

[wild ember]

have not

[delicate delta]

while I was playing around with that light up there on the moon terrain it made me think of the beginning chapter of fire upon the deep

a vinge book

there's this "zones of thought" thing in this series of books

where intelligence different zones in the universe can run at different speeds

we're in the slow zone

[wild ember]

Like time dialation?

[delicate delta]

sort of, only the speed at which computations can happen

and in the fast zone, super intelligence can exist

which is basically god like to us slow small brain types, and we cannot survive there

but things sort of fall out of the fast zone int our zone and sometimes slow zone lifeforms like us find those things and get into trouble

like advanced tech

so I was thinking maybe a game where you trying to scavange some advanced intelligence tech via a top down from some hostile moon

a top down isometric 3D scene I mean

something idk

still thinking about it, but this game seems way easier to make then where my escape game was going

in terms of the amount of art and animations I'd have to make and the quality at which it would have to be made

and the amount of physics etc

#1248864886772072591 message

^^ that right there I kept doing that and thinking about, what if I was looking for something as part of a game

I think that would be fun, at least for me

"The Ascent" shows that it's possible to make a game like that really nice looking too

[wild ember]

I was thinking a strategy game when I read that, but the ascent looks more like a tactics game

[delicate delta]

I just mean more ascetics

[wild ember]

ascetics? you mean aesthetics?

[delicate delta]

er

aesthetics yes

sorry

[wild ember]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asceticism

[delicate delta]

oh I like that too

but that's not what I meant

[wild ember]

so is it gonna be like a strategy game?

like are you gonna have multiple units or do you control one character

[delicate delta]

multiple units I think

not many though

[wild ember]

Ooh RTS plz!

[delicate delta]

I'm terrible at RTS :P

I love them though

we'll see

[wild ember]

Yeh I still play AOE2

one of my top games of all time

[delicate delta]

I had a college semester my grades dipped due to brood wars heh

I stopped playing after that

[wild ember]

Did you ever play SC2?

[delicate delta]

ys

I played wings of liberty at least

[wild ember]

yeh

[delicate delta]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_EgH0paUTQ

uninvestigate is so inspiring

[late jackal]

!remindme 30 minutes look at dis

[rain musk]

New Reminder | ID:73867145

Alright gpgpu, I'll remind you in 30 minutes about:

look at dis

[late jackal]

steampilled

a few bits of it are fucky wucky but overall it looks a lot better than I expected

[delicate delta]

it is a really nice theme

[wild ember]

Thats a nice graph at the bottom, what are you using to draw it?

[late jackal]

implot

[wild ember]

I need to start using that

[delicate delta]

ok ok last one top down, it's kind of cool I thought

I really like that video

anyway

time to end this chapter

[zinc trail]

https://github.com/fstrugar/CDLOD/blob/master/cdlod_paper_latest.pdf

I myself use a variety of cdlod. It's a bit on the older side but works pretty good still

[ivory verge]

ogldev has a 4 or 5 parter series on terrain lodding with skirts

[ivory verge]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Rbk6xRzs6g&list=PLA0dXqQjCx0S9qG5dWLsheiCJV-_eLUM0

[delicate delta]

Oh so I think I can use a single texture array per point light with glFramebufferTextureLayer for shadowmaps

I still have to create multiple framebuffer objects but attach one layer of the texture array and then I can just have one sampler per point light’s shadowmaps

That’s better than what I had

Would be cool to have just use one framebuffer per point light though and reuse for multiple passes but that wasn’t working for me when I tried it

[wild ember]

You can also use an atlas instead of a texture array

I have the atlas transform built into the shadow matrix

[delicate delta]

I see what resolution is your atlas?

do you have any point lights in your game that you're generating shadows for?

the dream would be a single framebuffer with a single texture to generate all the shadows for all the point lights

[wild ember]

Right now its used for cascades mostly, so each cascade is 2048x2048 (at default settings, the user can increase or decrease shadow detail) so for 4 cascades you need at least a 4096x4096 atlas (or 2048x8192 if you prefer)

theres potentially a way to further pack things in an atlas that you can't with an array http://the-witness.net/news/2010/04/graphics-tech-shadow-maps-part-2-save-25-texture-memory-and-possibly-much-more/

I may try this in the future

[delicate delta]

cascades are usually done with directional sunlight and not point lights yes?

[late jackal]

I have another suggestion for saving memory

[wild ember]

VSM?

[late jackal]

perhaps.gif

[delicate delta]

I mean saving memory is nice, my problem has just been with the ergonomics of having to deal with so many objects, which is fine if that's normal, but I am wondering if I am being inefficient about it

I haven't tried to optmize anything, some scenes load pretty slow because I just serial read big textures and .obj files because I just don't care right now

[ivory verge]

yes : )

[wild ember]

I wouldn't worry about optimizing it just yet

[delicate delta]

hey zed build on windows for me without errors for the first time ever :O

maybe time to switch editors

[delicate delta]

geometry shader stuff

[merry surge]

too bad its clangd/clang-tody integration is still shit

[delicate delta]

It’s zig integration isn’t great either

[maiden gazelle]

I had a rather long break from Discord, but I see you've been busy 🚀

[delicate delta]

Welcome back! Always busy!

[delicate delta]

a wip

[wild ember]

A comet? 🤩

[delicate delta]

idk really know was just trying to do my own particle stuff

still a wip

[ivory verge]

RGB spermlet 😛

[delicate delta]

I don't think the geometry shader is all that useful tbh

[delicate delta]

the chapter is using the geometry shader, this scene here I'm just coming up with to see if I can spam a bunch of particles and make them more interesting with the geometry shader idk

I don't want to spend too much time on it, but I have already learned stuff by going off the reserveration like there's 60 max vertex limit for my gpu

I thought I could just spam 1K

[delicate delta]

yes that was unfortunate, not at all what I was going for lol

[ivory verge]

hehe

[delicate delta]

I will put a little bit more effort into it today

[ivory verge]

otherwise it gives AccumBuffer vibes from the gl legacy ages

[delicate delta]

it's just lerping a hermite spline here

in a loop

[wild ember]

There was a time where the geometry shader was the only way to do layered rendering. But we have alternatives now

The driver usually had special code paths for that specific scenario. Because normal geometry shader usage was slow AF

[delicate delta]

ah, what do you mean by layered rendering?

[wild ember]

For example rendering all sides of a cubemaps in a single pass

So you could send in a bunch of geometry and have different bits drawn to different targets

[delicate delta]

ah the cubemap I render is just in the one rendering pass I have for the whole scene

[wild ember]

I mean like without having to bind to different targets

So you can do like an instanced draw call and have each instance appear on a different layer

[delicate delta]

this is for a color buffer right?

a color target

on a framebuffer

attachment

these names are all still new to me

[wild ember]

Could be depth or color it doesn't matter

[delicate delta]

no I don't think so

you can only have one depth attachment

I would love to be able to MRT depth

how do you do that?

[wild ember]

Yes but the attachment can have multiple layers

It's distinct from mrt

[delicate delta]

you can only attach one layer at a time

[wild ember]

False

This is where layered rendering comes in

[delicate delta]

oh well that's good to know, how do I attach multiple?

I couldn't figure out how to do this

I don't want to do 6 passes for a pointlight

[wild ember]

This is exactly the motivation

[delicate delta]

I saw I could attach to a framebuffer one layer with one depth target

when I attach a texture

[wild ember]

One depth target yes

But the texture can have multiple layers

[delicate delta]

yes but the glFramebuffer... only accepts one texture and one layer arg

I forget the actual function let me look

I'm on my work computer

[wild ember]

Yeah me too

Maybe there was a logl tutorial I can't remember

[delicate delta]

glFramebufferTextureLayer

[wild ember]

But instead of binding a layer you bind the whole texture

[delicate delta]

I don't know of a way to do that

would be happy to learn, I was happy enough to just be able to have a single texture with layers but my current method still needs a separate framebuffer per layer each with its own pass

[wild ember]

I don't have my code rn so I can't show you, but I think you just call glFrameBufferTexture no layer

The magic happens in the shader

[delicate delta]

I don't do anything in my shader that's target aware, also how would it know which camera to use?

like my code assumes the camera is per pass

this is very interesting

[wild ember]

There's a gl_Layer variable in glsl

[delicate delta]

oh

[wild ember]

It can be assigned in the geometry shader, or more recently in the vertex shader

That defines which layer of the output texture it goes to

[delicate delta]

oh searching for gl_layer unlocked a lot of knowledge

thank you!

In the geometry language, gl_Layer is used to select a specific layer (or face and layer of cube map) in a multi-layer framebuffer attachment. The actual layer used will come from one of the vertices in the primitive being shaded.

it's usable in the fragment and geometry stage

[wild ember]

https://learnopengl.com/Advanced-Lighting/Shadows/Point-Shadows

They do cover it in Logl!

[delicate delta]

nice

thank you

[wild ember]

I think the vs shader requires a ubiquitous extension

GL_ARB_vertex_shader_layer or something like that

[delicate delta]

I am really happy that there’s a better way to do this

[wild ember]

Chances are if you thought there should be a better way, someone else did too

Luckily this person was john khronos

[delicate delta]

Good ol johnny K

[delicate delta]

I have to learn how to do all this in vk soon so just getting a high level gl understanding works for me, I'm honestly more interested in the general sense of how stuff works that's more api agnostic. I got four chapters left in this book and then I'm just going heads down on moving to vk

if it turns out I don't like vk I think I will actually not come back to gl but start using SDL's new gpu

api

which is about as stable as zig is so, perfect for a hobbyiest like me

[granite bolt]

🤣

[delicate delta]

sorry I was just sort of talking to myself and I don't really know how stable SDL GPU is

it is very new is all

[queen hinge]

[delicate delta]

did you guys know stuff can fall in space

the geometry shader is really slow

I wanted way more particles

[ivory verge]

damn

that skybox makes it 10000x times better already

[delicate delta]

some of those particles have a drop velocity close to zero so it creates those columns of particles

idk I was just experimenting, this wasn't in the book

I'm on to new stuff now

[wild ember]

I do all the particle simulation in the VS, and use point sprites

[delicate delta]

these are points that I turned into quads in the geometry shader

instanced draws were ruined by that

[wild ember]

you can just use point sprites

[delicate delta]

how do you send texture coordinates with a point

[wild ember]

you get gl_PointCoord

you can rotate and scale that however you like

gl_PointCoord is basically just the UV space of the particle

[delicate delta]

ah the vulkan spec definese how points are rasterized https://registry.khronos.org/vulkan/specs/1.3-extensions/html/vkspec.html#primsrast-points-basic

neat

whenever I run into some gl thing I go look at how it's handled in vk since I'm doing that next

I looked at layered rendering in vk yesterday too

[wild ember]

the shader stuff is pretty much the same

minor differences here and there

[queen hinge]

Main difference is uniforms

Compared to GL3X at least

[delicate delta]

I never get a good answer why people use something other than 4.6 unless they're working on a minecraft mod I guess

by good answer, one that I understand and makes sense to me

[queen hinge]

I don’t understand GL4.6 personally
Also apple doesn’t support 4.6, only supports up to 4.5

[delicate delta]

Apple doesn't support opengl at all

deprecated means unsupported

it exists because someone hasn't removed it yet

[queen hinge]

Support as in
able to use

it is supported that apple can use 4.5 but not 4.6

[delicate delta]

they're just going to pull the rug on it at any moment

it's been deprecated for like 10 years now

they removed the xcode support for it

it's not supported

do you feel supported?

is removing core debugging functionality, putting a big deprecated warning on the docs and building their own API feel like they support it

[queen hinge]

I also don’t have apple device that is not a phone, so I don’t really care about debugging support

I only care about is able to run

[delicate delta]

I wish they would just pull the rug on it

I wonder if minecraft java is the only reason

I wonder if apple GPU devs are on the call with Mojang all the time begging for them to use metal

[ivory verge]

apple can only run gl 41 natively

gl45 and gl46 are other things via emulaton layers or asahi, but thats not macos

[queen hinge]

Apple better be making those JNI bindings if they want that

[delicate delta]

maybe apple will just fund mojang's moltengl bill

[wild ember]

should be using UBOs for the most part tho

[wild ember]

I just ignore the existence of apple tbh

[delicate delta]

Metal is a great api, I stand by that

[queen hinge]

I have no ability to try metal

[delicate delta]

me neither

[wild ember]

I have no doubt, but it may as well not exist, unless I was trying to target iOS

[delicate delta]

yup

so my approach to vulkan is: finish the vulkan 1.0 programming guide book, read the spec, then using all these pakt books I will try and piece together rebuilding my existing scenes starting with the point and triangle scene, then my procedural geometry mesh scenes (cubes, pyramid, spheres etc), then my obj scene, then shadows, tess and geometry and I should be back where I was

[delicate delta]

the vulkan memory incoherence and unordered command queue seems like the most challenging thing about the API

and not the apis's verbosity

[elder kettle]

The spec is like 1500 pages lol I would just read vkguide and port your project to Vulkan in-place

That will teach you most of the practical aspects

[delicate delta]

I already mostly went over it

Each section has a header I will read carefully

So it’s actually not a lot

I will read vkguide at some point just to review it as part of transitioning my existing scenes

[delicate delta]

I read through the spirv spec too

mostly because zig has a spirv target and std.gpu

at some point I can just write zig for shader code

and I was wondering how my GLSL would translate and reading through the spirv spec makes it actually pretty clear

like gl_Layer is std.gpu.Layer https://registry.khronos.org/SPIR-V/specs/unified1/SPIRV.html#BuiltIn

zig's spirv target isn't ready for rendering yet though

[late jackal]

why not?

[delicate delta]

because the main compiler dev is just making it work with opencl atm

https://github.com/Snektron/zig-opencl-spirv-demos/tree/main

[late jackal]

Sucks that cl and gl and vk all use different flavors of spirv

And soon dx probably

[delicate delta]

I guess this is what the spec means by "client api"?

https://registry.khronos.org/SPIR-V/specs/unified1/SPIRV.html#_execution_environment_and_client_api

cl, gl, vk and dx are all different client apis?

[late jackal]

yeah

but dx doesn't exist as a target yet

[delicate delta]

is this real? directx is going to support spirv?

this is an effort at Microsoft?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directx-adopting-spir-v/

[late jackal]

they made an announcement

ye

it was very recent

[delicate delta]

just support vulkan

wtf

[late jackal]

lol

[delicate delta]

this is basically just making directx better

because now you have a better compiler and can accept more shader types

[late jackal]

it means less duplicated compiler effort, if they eventually sunset dxc

well they need a good hlsl compiler so nvm

[delicate delta]

the hlsl to spirv is no good? :(

[late jackal]

it does work fine afaik

I wasn't thinking

If they sunset dxil that would be cool though

But their spirv support would need to be very mature first

[delicate delta]

next week it will be my 1 week anniversary doing game dev daily

looking at the zig server and my github history I started around first week of nov

my first project was an opengl snake game

I didn't know anything

I just made two triangles and copied them and moved them around to make that game

[late jackal]

How come the snake occasionally moves slowly? I'm used to it moving at a constant rate or a slowly increasing rate

[delicate delta]

it's moving fast because I'm holding the key down to move it

the base speed increases as the snake grows

but at the beginning the snake is too slow so I have a key to make it move fast

so when I get near the food I stop making it move fast

[late jackal]

Ah

That snake is cute btw

[delicate delta]

:D thanks

[late jackal]

I almost said "your snake" but realized how that would sound

[delicate delta]

lol

[harsh elbow]

you already figured out the most important thing, aesthetic is #1

[delicate delta]

I like using a limited palette of colors, and for those sprites I was using aseprite which makes it look 8bit

[queen hinge]

quite a good looking snake game though tbh

[delicate delta]

Rosy looking over the bay at San Francisco

[elder kettle]

Smells a lil smoky over here

#1147711082702589973 message

Not sure if from this or from somewhere else

[delicate delta]

Ohh

I am a little sick so can’t smell atm

But it was a little orangey at dusk

[delicate delta]

lol I tried profiling my zero optimized project with intel vtune

you can't even see my code in this

it's all just dear imgui and that's just the menu bar showing

my code is just loading assets

I just load it all serially blocking the whole frame

I kind of like vtune

[elder kettle]

Yeah lol you have to work pretty hard to make anything slow

[delicate delta]

fog

I also used a skydome the same color of the fog

hadn't used a skydome before

[delicate delta]

I'm gonna experiment with something

[delicate delta]

I have made a lot of stuff in this engine since June, this is just one out of four lists heh

[delicate delta]

blending

[ivory verge]

noice, you sort the spheres?

[delicate delta]

yes

[ivory verge]

or is that oit? ah

[delicate delta]

initially unsorted that's why it popped initially 😅

[ivory verge]

heh

[delicate delta]

easy to fix

those are instances

instanced draws

I sort the buffer data

those spheres are themselves indexed draws

ok sorted from the start now

idk how to do order independent

[queen hinge]

I know nothing about oit

[delicate delta]

I'm just going to have static geometry anyway

maybe some vehicles

with some transparent windows

some water

also static

idk

[delicate delta]

user defined clipping plane

[queen hinge]

oh?
this is something I want to understand but have no comprehension of

[delicate delta]

It uses the parameterized plane equation

An infinite plane can be defined by a surface normal and a distance from origin

4 values

Once you have those 4 values it’s like 3 lines if code

[queen hinge]

ohh
which order does it come in though?
xyzo or oxyz?

[delicate delta]

However you want

You take a dot product of the normal and vertex and add the distance

If the result is negative the vertex is clipped I believe

You write the value to the index of the gl_clipdistance array you enabled when drawing

[crystal mountain]

Just wait until next weekend. I'm in the middle of porting all my hlsl shaders to zig

[delicate delta]

that sounds great!

[delicate delta]

how'd you find that in the scrollback on this thread? did you search for zig?

[crystal mountain]

I always do

[delicate delta]

it's just mostly me spamming this server with zig :P

[crystal mountain]

Also been following this post for a while

[delicate delta]

you should make a community thread yourself, what are you building? besides working on Mach I guess

[crystal mountain]

Just putting random GP techniques together

[delicate delta]

that's cool

[crystal mountain]

I don't get enough time to continue it tho. Only keep it up to date time to time

[crystal mountain]

I haven't worked on mach recently either. Maybe more than a year since last contribution

[delicate delta]

oh

yeah it takes a lot to contribute to other projects I don't do any of that myself

just work on this

[crystal mountain]

Specially when your goals doesn't match

[delicate delta]

oh, yeah that's important

[queen hinge]

I have a few projects I contribute to that aren't my own

[delicate delta]

looking forward to your next zig thing though, I hope you have time for some zig anyway

[delicate delta]

I have to work with others for my job, so I really enjoy the peace of having a solo project that I can do whatever I want with

[crystal mountain]

Like just look how sysaudio is bit rotting. Working on Sysgpu was fun but uhh all that effort to build a wgsl compiler. How did I even thought that would be a good idea lol

If I owned those, the state would be very different

[delicate delta]

that's too bad, it sucks when hard work is tossed

[delicate delta]

I rolled my own little horizon effect :D (I have no idea what I am doing)

doing something useful with the skydome I guess

[delicate delta]

3D texture

[delicate delta]

I did some noise stuff to build a marble 3d texture but is unbelievably slow

So I think I will add yet another zig buildup step so I can just build 3D textures with it and save the bytes to use at runtime

Instead of waiting 15 seconds for the scene to load

I am using stb_perlin

I think runtime noise is not gonna be a thing for me unless I integrate fastnoise2 via a C++ wrapper at some point

I love this take from flut on zig game dev 3 weeks ago about Vulkan #634812978994085888 message

I think about it a lot, and convinced me about my current path

I am not planning on giga barriers or copy pasting an init though

That whole conversation is great

[crystal mountain]

imho you should go with either Vulkan or DX12 and not any of those wrappers like WebGPU and SDL. those are the real waste of time. sure vulkan is verbose but not harder than those apis

[delicate delta]

Yeah going with Vulkan

[queen hinge]

It took me a moment to realize rosy’s silhouette wasn’t an anthro, lol

[delicate delta]

She is very fancy looking in that picture

I really like 3D textures

They are fun

[queen hinge]

she is

[queen hinge]

sync is the main thing with vulkan that's annoying

because if you mess up sync, you're going to have all sorts of issues

[wise imp]

can confirm that pic

its the approach vkguide uses for a reason

and for what ive been able to see, gigabarrier spam works completely fine because the gpus are going to do a full sync anyway on most stuff

[delicate delta]

Nice

[elder kettle]

shit, don't tempt me to try Vulkan again

[merry surge]

https://tenor.com/view/do-it-dark-kermit-gif-13921433

[queen hinge]

actually tempted to do both directx and vulkan

have front end just be hundreds of method stubs

[elder kettle]

DX11 is annoying

Maybe you mean DX12

[queen hinge]

yeah I mean dx12

(method stubs are basically just ralux's equivalent of function pointers)

[elder kettle]

For a hobby project I don't really see the point of DX12

[merry surge]

just act as if #directx doesn't exist

#vulkan is the only option

[queen hinge]

forget vulkan, opengl, and directx. I use cuda and opencl as my graphics pipelines now /s

[delicate delta]

I am nearly done with this 3D texture stuff, then there’s a water chapter and two ray tracing chapters and I am done with the opengl book and I will be switching then to vk

[ivory verge]

i would really like to get that srs DLC where you simulate soldiers off time, randomly they follow their dreams and hobbies.... and one of the hobbies is becoming a frog, working on some graphics engine, with endless battles in #bikeshed

[elder kettle]

lmao

[ivory verge]

we spoke about the linux on those military doodads already

why not go further

[elder kettle]

Is there a way to run graphics in a tty

[ivory verge]

ofc

[elder kettle]

how does it work

also let's talk in my thread lol although I appreciate that you used Bjorn's thread to discuss my game lol

[ivory verge]

tty is at least a screen with a resolution of 80x25 pixels

[delicate delta]

There’s a zig tui library where someone wrote a doom clone for it so yes

[ivory verge]

you dither colors into ascii characters 😛

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW-pDkDvcfE

[queen hinge]

lol what

[ivory verge]

srs is demon's project 🙂 shooting range simulator 2023

i keep teasing him with new dlc ideas

[delicate delta]

we're all actually living in a srs universe sym dlc and don't know it

[delicate delta]

since I'm just building for a hobby and for myself I am going to just use shader objects I think https://www.khronos.org/blog/you-can-use-vulkan-without-pipelines-today

Pipelines require every desired combination of shaders (all stages when using conventional “monolithic” pipelines, or certain pre-defined combinations of stages when using pipeline libraries) to be compiled together, whereas shader objects allow stages to be compiled in arbitrary combinations, including compiling every shader individually.

With pipelines, linking is an explicit step that creates a new object with its own lifetime that needs to be managed by the application. With shader objects, linking is simply a creation-time promise from the application to the implementation that it will always use certain combinations of shader objects together.
Pipelines must always be linked before being used, whereas linking shader objects is optional.

Pipelines allow implementations to require some state to be statically provided at compile time, whereas with shader objects all state is always set dynamically and is independent from shaders.

Pipelines require rendering attachment formats to be specified at pipeline creation time, whereas shader objects don’t. Shader objects can be used with any valid combination of attachment formats supported by the device.

With pipelines, compiled shader code can be retrieved and reused by the application in the form of a pipeline cache, but this data is not usable by itself to create new pipelines. With shader objects, compiled shader code can be retrieved directly from any shader object and is guaranteed to be usable to create an equivalent shader object on any compatible physical device without the need to provide the original SPIR-V.

seems worth it

although maybe renderdoc doesn't support it

fuck

https://github.com/baldurk/renderdoc/issues/3355

[queen hinge]

Implemented by Nintendo in #3364 - I believe they will be primarily maintaining it going forwards.

[delicate delta]

lol

[queen hinge]

Nintendo?

[delicate delta]

that's bad ass

[queen hinge]

that's the freaking last name I expected to see there, lol

[delicate delta]

renderdoc is amazing though the industry should throw its weight behind it :<

[queen hinge]

oh yeah I agree but like
I just wasn't expecting to see nintendo of all things there

[delicate delta]

$ zig build ft3d -freference-trace=11 -- --type striped --output texture3d --name striped.vol
Starting ft3d.
args:
        --type ft3d.Args.texture_type_opt.striped
        --output texture3d
        --name: striped.vol
ft3d finished.
$ ls .\texture3d\

    Directory: C:\Users\swart\projects\foundations\texture3d

Mode                 LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                 -------------         ------ ----
-a---          10/27/2024  3:40 PM       67108864 striped.vol

🎉

let's see if actually loads the bytes

hrm

I should probably generate them to the app cache directory

and not commit 64MB 3D textures to github

that means writing a 3D texture loader, but before that I'll just check if they're actually correct by just embedding them

[merry surge]

I hope you have LFS configured

[delicate delta]

I am not going to commit, in fact I'll add a gitignore for .vol :P

probably for all asset types png, gltf obj etc

lol I can't embed these, the stack is 8mb

[delicate delta]

it works!

now it doesn't take 30 seconds to load the scene any more

still has to read all that data from disk though I should compress, some other time though

I need to generate a wood texture and a cloud texture and then I'm done with this chapter but before that I have to pay property taxes and carve pumpkins and walk Rosy

I need to add shadows to this scene too

it looks really dark also

[ivory verge]

is glEnable(GL_FRAMEBUFFER_SRGB) in?

[delicate delta]

yup srgb moment

also the bump map normal is wrong

[ivory verge]

not seeing any bumps hehe

[delicate delta]

those dark areas are bumps

and they're facing the light direction

the scene was taking 30 seconds to load so I never noticed it before

now it's correct

[late jackal]

Where'd the shadows go

[delicate delta]

I have to add those still

I have to manually add shadows to each scene atm :(

I am going to make shadows generic and just easy for each scene to have

like just each scene needs just a directional light with shadows out of the box

that would actually require rewriting how I load objects in, which I should do

I just want to get through this book honestly

so I can just rewrite it all in vk anyway

[delicate delta]

Pumpkins carved, taxes paid let me do proper shadows so my scenes just have it

[wild ember]

where have I seen that texture before...

[delicate delta]

I just wanted some grass :<

[wild ember]

hehe

[delicate delta]

I didn't realize it was the same until you said that

[wild ember]

I just took it from the same texture library you did lol

no worries

[elder kettle]

Bjorn can stake his claim to it when his game surpasses yours in maturity

[delicate delta]

jake will have launched 10 successful games in that time

he'll have a full team of phds in grass rendering working for his studio and won't care about the texture by then

[wild ember]

I don't care about the texture now lol

Just thought it was funny we used the same one

[delicate delta]

it's pretty good

[wild ember]

Yeah its from freepbr right?

[delicate delta]

yes

it has nice ground textures

I used theirs for my fog scene too

[wild ember]

A pretty decent chunk of my textures are from there

[delicate delta]

they have a nice viewer too, it's a nice site

[delicate delta]

alright shadows ok

:P

much easier to add them to a scene now

[queen hinge]

A familiar carving on that nearby pumpkin

[ivory verge]

is this CSM already?

[late jackal]

VSM 💪

[delicate delta]

I don’t what those mean

Oh no

This is just a simple shadow map

Built in a reusable way

I do not have any good system yet

Every new scene is a blank canvas and to add each thing I still have to do a bunch of scaffolding

I don’t know what CSM means but I know what you meant

Making this better is work for after switching to vulkan

[elder kettle]

Cascaded shadow maps basically larger and larger shadow maps to cover more distant shadows at lower resolution

VSM is doing the same thing but with pages of virtual texture memory

[delicate delta]

Oh I am not going to get to that until I read more about shadows

I understand point lights shadows quite well now, but cascaded shadow maps for directional parallel light that follows the view frustum using an orthographic projection seems way harder, just even this was a struggle.

It just honestly doesn’t look right even now

I am just missing some key thing. It hasn’t clicked yet

The books all cover shadows in great detail though

It’s all blocked by the vk move and three more chapters in my opengl book

The shadowpass I added is tied to the camera and I added the shadows mvp to the camera ubo and it can update whenever the camera moves at least

I am still manually calling draw commands for individual meshes, this reusable shadowpass is like my first draw a bunch of stuff system

I remember discussing VSM in here before actually

[queen hinge]

I’ve mentioned it at least once… I think

And jaker has probably talked about it here

[delicate delta]

wood block

[delicate delta]

3D texture cloud effect

[late jackal]

Nice, how do you get the texture?

[delicate delta]

I generated it

[late jackal]

At load time?

[ivory verge]

noise

[delicate delta]

no it's way too slow

I wrote a build step to generate 3d textures

[late jackal]

You could forgo the texture and sample simplex noise in your shader

Brainworm level 2: add ray marching

[late jackal]

How are you sampling it?

[delicate delta]

with 3d coordinates

I rotate it the coordinates based delta time and change the depth

it's a technique from the book

it's all in a branch still

[late jackal]

Where do the coordinates come from?

[delicate delta]

the sky dome

[late jackal]

Ah, that makes sense

[delicate delta]

it's hard to link to it

https://github.com/btipling/foundations/blob/6a0a31f5eabd36d9ceef7d5bbd92e2ceeceaabc3/src/foundations/scenes/cgpoc/chapter14/textures_3d/sphere_vert.glsl#L42

that's it

it's really basic :/

https://github.com/btipling/foundations/blob/6a0a31f5eabd36d9ceef7d5bbd92e2ceeceaabc3/src/ft3d/Cloud.zig

that generates the texture

it's a bit different from the book

they rolled their own perlin noise I just use stb

the one in the book is too slow

[delicate delta]

yes that makes sense

[delicate delta]

it's kind of interesting how the sky dome is just a 1 unit radius sphere, and you're just basically walking around with a bubble around your head. I forgot about that, I set an effect to use the sphere's world space x(up) to do a frag shader thing and it changed dramatically as I walked around

[delicate delta]

maybe I'm just going to make 3d textures from now on

I'm going to use this for a disintegration animation

[late jackal]

did you already use your clipping thing to look into these volumes?

[delicate delta]

oh

[late jackal]

just thinking about it makes me crave cake, lol

[delicate delta]

well the geometry is hollow

I could scale it

if I clip it it doesn't look into it unless I draw a surface where it is clipped

which I could do

scaling would distort I guess

3D textures really cool

it is very cake like

there's actually all the data for the texture that fills the volume

the disintegration is the last part of this chapter

I gotta get through this book

I'm gonna knock it out even though it's 1 am

my sleep schedule has gone to shit

[late jackal]

consequences of being on this server

[delicate delta]

somehow I still have a job

I woke up this morning, well yesterday morning, and had a meeting in my pajamas

zoom camera on lol

[elder kettle]

My double precision port had me up until 2am for the last 3 days I'm trying to fix mine by going to bed now at the early early hour of 1am

This morning I slept through my alarm and woke up at 11am

[delicate delta]

sometimes people on my team sleep in and miss morning standup, but I can't, I'm the manager lol

I just, get less sleep

[delicate delta]

good enough for 2 am

gn lol

[delicate delta]

starting out on a simulating water scene, there is no water yet, just a floor and a skybox. this is just an in progress share

I like seeing my progress

I'll make more progress tomorrow

[ivory verge]

i like how this checker board is not as plagued by antialiasing as it usually does when a frog starts out with naively rendering a checker board 😛

[maiden gazelle]

Nice dissolve

Is it geometry shader?

Skybox reflections are cool too

[maiden gazelle]

Acerola has nice videos on water, with references listed in descriptions if I'm not mistaken. May be of help.

[queen hinge]

Looks to me like vertex hashing to generate alpha, discard fragment if alpha > threshold

[maiden gazelle]

Hmm yeah it looks organic, not geometric

Discord compression got the better of me

[queen hinge]

or alpha < threshold, both ways would work the same if values are configured correctly for the given operator 🤷

[ivory verge]

or bayesian dithering

[queen hinge]

the wat

[ivory verge]

float Bayer_matrix[8][8] = {
    {0.0/65.0, 32.0/65.0, 8.0/65.0, 40.0/65.0, 2.0/65.0, 34.0/65.0, 10.0/65.0, 42.0/65.0},
    {48.0/65.0, 16.0/65.0, 56.0/65.0, 24.0/65.0, 50.0/65.0, 18.0/65.0, 58.0/65.0, 26.0/65.0},
    {12.0/65.0, 44.0/65.0, 4.0/65.0, 36.0/65.0, 14.0/65.0, 46.0/65.0, 6.0/65.0, 38.0/65.0},
    {60.0/65.0, 28.0/65.0, 52.0/65.0, 20.0/65.0, 62.0/65.0, 30.0/65.0, 54.0/65.0, 22.0/65.0},
    {3.0/65.0, 35.0/65.0, 11.0/65.0, 43.0/65.0, 1.0/65.0, 33.0/65.0, 9.0/65.0, 41.0/65.0},
    {51.0/65.0, 19.0/65.0, 59.0/65.0, 27.0/65.0, 49.0/65.0, 17.0/65.0, 57.0/65.0, 25.0/65.0},
    {15.0/65.0, 47.0/65.0, 7.0/65.0, 39.0/65.0, 13.0/65.0, 45.0/65.0, 5.0/65.0, 37.0/65.0},
    {63.0/65.0, 31.0/65.0, 55.0/65.0, 23.0/65.0, 61.0/65.0, 29.0/65.0, 53.0/65.0, 21.0/65.0}
};
...
uvec2 viewport_pos = uvec2(gl_FragCoord.xy);
if(outFragColor.a <= (Bayer_matrix[viewport_pos.x % BayerMatrixDim][viewport_pos.y % BayerMatrixDim])) discard;
...

[maiden gazelle]

Is it like a post-processing kernel, to mask opaque pixels I guess

[ivory verge]

it provides a dithered transition of textures with alpha

you can see it in action when you load old sponza

and look at ze plant pots

[delicate delta]

It’s sampling a 3D noise texture and discarding fragments when a float uniform that is time delta is less than the sampled noise

[delicate delta]

I have no idea why it’s not. I just use a modulus of the interpolated z and y axis values in the frag shader

Was just the first idea I had

I actually see a bit of antialiasing could just be image size

[ivory verge]

yeah it definitly has but moiree is less obvious than usual, thats good

[delicate delta]

Oh, yeah. I got rid of that by managing the scale of the tiles. The real fix I think is inverse depth perspective as I believe it is a floating point precision problem?

[ivory verge]

i have no idea tbh, there are papers and or blogs about it, similar to inifinite grid thingy

[delicate delta]

The book covered the problem early on where more actual detail than sampled distorts distant textures

[ivory verge]

i see

[queen hinge]

More efficient than the checkerboards I make

[delicate delta]

It has a nice picture explaining the issue

[queen hinge]

(I tend to do every square as geometry, because usually I don’t have textures yet when I’m doing a checkerboard and a flat color would be pain because I’m doing stuff with VR)

[delicate delta]

In this case it’s not a texture, I did my own checkerboard and didn’t follow the example

[ivory verge]

ah

[delicate delta]

I can’t do half the stuff in the book due to x up and zig

[ivory verge]

you can fix that

[delicate delta]

So frequently have to solve my own way

[ivory verge]

by switching to c++/c# 😛

and by using a transformation matrix which turns +x up to +z forward

[delicate delta]

Nah

I already do that transformation

[queen hinge]

Oh also
Found out recently
Rider has become free without a student license (assuming you have data collection turned on)
So I’ll probably begin using C# more often in the near future ig

[ivory verge]

their datacollection is purely functional

and yes im aware

all editions are free btw, when you use the early access versions, but they crash quite often

[delicate delta]

I don’t want to transform my light and model spaces all the time just to follow the examples verbatim and I like coming up with my own solutions

[ivory verge]

i was just teasing

[queen hinge]

I have data collection on for IDEA by choice, so I don’t really mind the data collection regardless, lol

[delicate delta]

been watching marmoset toolbag videos on youtube, going to start watching houdini videos too and then an animation creator too at some point. I think I will be able to create ok custom DCC

[delicate delta]

a long way to go still to make this look any good

[delicate delta]

switched my label emojis to for textures to be 🖼️ for regular texture, 👤 for a shadow map texture, 🎨 for a color attachment framebuffer texture and ⏬ for a depth attachment texture

:D

there's so many emojis

[elder kettle]

Wait that actually worked? The emojis in renderdoc thing?

[delicate delta]

yes it's so great

[elder kettle]

Lmao wild

[delicate delta]

I can actually filter the events by the emoji

[queen hinge]

that's incredible

[elder kettle]

This is going in the iceberg @late jackal

[late jackal]

What is

[elder kettle]

This madness

[late jackal]

ah ye that's cool but idk if it fits the iceberg

hmm I guess it works

[delicate delta]

what's an iceberg

[late jackal]

#showcase message

gp lore

[delicate delta]

2023 seemed fun

[late jackal]

I just add stuff to the iceberg every time

[delicate delta]

this is looking really promising

[elder kettle]

It's a historical record of all the insane shit that goes down in this server

[delicate delta]

I like this server

[elder kettle]

Me too

[delicate delta]

I'm sorry but my emojis are so helpful

I am doing nothing wrong, untoward or unlawful

but I had to write a convert quaterion to euler representation to flip my camera ^^ and that may be

ok let's try and sample these textures if it works I will cry if it doesn't I will also cry

[queen hinge]

Yeah that’s a sin

Especially if you wanna do vr stuff

[delicate delta]

I don't want to do any vr stuff ever

this book has a vr chapter, I'm skipping it

[queen hinge]

I have actually used a gimbal locked camera in vr once
Upon entering the gimbal lock, my mind automatically tried following the curve of the gimbal lock causing me to nearly fall off my chair… twice

[delicate delta]

man, working on a VR game has to be the worst job

in the industry

do they just have to wear the thing all day long

[late jackal]

no

[delicate delta]

my euler conversion accounts for gimbal lock

I'm not rotating using euler angles

I'm just trying to extract the pitch

and it works I think

[queen hinge]

Was a weird experience
Like I just instantly lost control over my body because my eyes saw the world moving in a weird way

[delicate delta]

I'm sure there's a better way but this one I can understand

[delicate delta]

I bet!

:<

I'm not claustrophobic or anything, but I can't wear a VR headset

I could do AR

[late jackal]

the game devs have a skill issue if their vr camera can have gimbal lock

[delicate delta]

like if they're glasses

I need situational awareness

[queen hinge]

VR headsets are obnoxious, yeah
I’ve done VR dev stuff and it is a lot of taking off and putting on the headset, which is really annoying

[queen hinge]

Trust me, that’s not the problem with vr

[delicate delta]

?

how can you be situational aware if you have a VR headset on your head

[queen hinge]

Newer headsets have features to let you see outside of the headset

[delicate delta]

oh how does that work

[queen hinge]

The headsets rely on on-board cameras for motion tracking
Might as well add a button to view their image and a feature to do that automatically if the person leaves their play area 🤷

[queen hinge]

I didn’t really know what a quaternion was at the time

[late jackal]

oh I thought you were referring to a game you played

[queen hinge]

nah

I was doing vr dev stuff when I didn’t have nearly enough knowledge to do so

[late jackal]

btw the gimbal lock issue is a property of euler angles. quats and matrices can represent any rotation, so you just need to construct them correctly

[queen hinge]

aware

at this point I can get beta minecraft running in VR in like 3 days
which requires weirdly bodging lwjgl 3 into an lwjgl 2 game without updating the lwjgl 2 game to use lwjgl 3

[queen hinge]

I think the meta quest 3 even has support for AR
… which makes me really disappointed that I only have a 2

quest 2 only has grayscale cameras
I believe quest 3 has color ones

[delicate delta]

progress

still a lot to do

I'll pick it back up tomorrow after work

[queen hinge]

The way the clouds come with you as you move feels bizarre

[delicate delta]

in the book this scene only lets you go up and down, I have a free moving camera

I think once I add surface waves it will look less weird though

[elder kettle]

The clouds moving with you is accurate

it probably looks weird because you're expecting more surface variation to convey the motion

so yeah surface waves will help

Clouds also aren't stationary irl ideally they'd be moving

[queen hinge]

I think what it is
is just,
Object A is clearly behind object B but object B reflects object C, so it then looks like object C is behind object A while also looking like it’s infront

But yeah surf var will prob help

[delicate delta]

what is object a b and c in this?

[queen hinge]

obj A is grid, obj B is water surface

checkerboard

[delicate delta]

the view of the clouds is from a reflected camera beneath the surface

[elder kettle]

The color does also look a bit weird

I don't think tinting the reflection is the right thing to do

Or if it is not quite so strongly

[delicate delta]

that's without any tinting

I lied

I am using a material

I forgot about it

[queen hinge]

Maybe like a 1% tint or so?

[delicate delta]

I also thought it was weird but I had totally forgotten I made water material, the book doesnt' ahve it

I totally had forgotten about the material

I must blind "there's no tint"

jfc

maybe I shouldn't be graphics programming

[elder kettle]

nonsense

that looks much better

[delicate delta]

yes

[elder kettle]

The tint is what you'd expect from transmission not reflection that's why it looked weird

[maiden gazelle]

Yeah I'm stealing this

[delicate delta]

I think it is really helpful

I am still figuring out the right emojis

I think in the resource browser the vao being a blue box work but not in the event browser

I think maybe more valuable to have an emoji per object type drawn

[queen hinge]

Far better

[delicate delta]

is this made by a frog https://github.com/DiligentGraphics/DiligentEngine ?

this is cool https://github.com/Caerind/AwesomeCppGameDev

[ivory verge]

no

i believe it existed before discord.

[delicate delta]

oh hadn't heard of it

a coworker wants to use it

[queen hinge]

https://github.com/DiligentGraphics/DiligentEngine/tree/bf128deefa7d51132d2530ee0ec5f80538412671
from 2015, still being actively updated, and I’ve never heard of it
wow

Dude’s username is accurate

[delicate delta]

so

I had a typing issue in go today that took me a long time to resolve

I had a []byte slice I was passing into a function that took a string

the thing what I read it from called itself a string type, it's complicated go abstraction at my job

anyway this thing was .pem key and was failing to work

I think I had a string, it wasn't, the fix turned out to be to just string() the thing

I hate it

you know zig would just not have compiled

there's no implicit casting at all ever

and a lot of people hate all the manual casting

but I fucking love it

and why didn't the implicit casting do the sting thing? why does an explicit string() behave differently? I don't know and I don't want to read up on it just right now

I am spoiled by zig, I should not write zig, I just expect everything to be as good

[queen hinge]

I like auto casting in some cases
not all

[delicate delta]

but when you don't like it, you really really don't like it right

[queen hinge]

primitive types and hierarchy compatible
also string concat and print statements

... usually I'm not in a scenario outside of that for auto casts though

[delicate delta]

I see

[queen hinge]

and then there's freaking this nonsense

because java generics are spaghetti

[delicate delta]

I don't know what happened to that image when you uploaded it, but I can't read it, it's heavily pixelated

ok I put on some better glasses

[queen hinge]

it's-
fine on my end

[delicate delta]

ok it could just be my eyes

[queen hinge]

it's a lil blurry but clicking on it makes it look fine

is this better?

[delicate delta]

are those dollar signs

yes that's much better

[queen hinge]

🤷 I use minecraft font for ij most of the time on my laptop

my eyes are just better at making sense of the mc font on my laptop than a smooth font for some reason

[delicate delta]

I got new glasses, but I got them with the blue light blocking and they have an issue I see double with them

so I need to get them replaced

[queen hinge]

huh

[delicate delta]

I have a lot of commits that are like "idk"

[delicate delta]

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/21817

I pulled the latest zig nightly and just have a ton of build errors

because of this

[queen hinge]

Hey bjorn, have you ever dealt with meta shapes?

[delicate delta]

I have read about metaballs

it's in the game math book I think

[queen hinge]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1183993413083865108/1302034686402367488/2024-11-01_18-19-47.mp4?ex=6726a5cb&is=6725544b&hm=becfba349d34955b3908ce9f02c7c4fc274a120c5616bf76ccbb4e6676dd2ead&
would advise fooling with them; actually very nice way to create shapes
(This is sorta just an approximation but it’s still a lot easier to work with than regular brushing in places)

[delicate delta]

https://www.gamemath.com/book/geomprims.html#spheres_and_circles

yeah seems like it would be good with terrain?

[queen hinge]

Certainly feels like it could be
Also pretty good for organic shapes

[delicate delta]

yeah, like alien plants

I think maybe zbrush is good at that

I improved my underwater experience a tiny bit, still a ton of work to do on this scene

[queen hinge]

Getting there; slowly but surely

[delicate delta]

this is a college textbook, I bet this used to be the final project

in this version they added 2 chapters for ray t*racing

at the end

they are huge chapters, like 1/4 of the book are just the last two chapters

[queen hinge]

(*tracing)

[delicate delta]

but anyway this scene feels like a test of everything the book had been about

oops typo, I meant tracing

[queen hinge]

I read ray racing and my mind went to racing the beam
that thing that really old video games would do

[delicate delta]

I just typed faster than my keyboard can handle sometimes

hrm

this needs to be better

[delicate delta]

still a lot more to do

[delicate delta]

I am going to timebox this scene to this weekend, even if I don't get it perfect. I can't spend forever on it, I'm not getting any medals or awards for getting it just perfect

I clearly still have learning gaps I need to fill

there's still a bunch to do though on it

[delicate delta]

I am watching these houdini and marmoset youtube playlists whenever I have time https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhyeWJ40aDkUDHDOhZQ2UkCfNiQj7hS5W https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDnx_izeQbePhgnSVHRFpPzVPcpV8Tr52

[ivory verge]

houdini's ui is so ugly

[delicate delta]

ya

[ivory verge]

ive seen it in a few videos, never used it myself

[delicate delta]

I watched a bunch of videos where people have made amazing things in just a tiny bit of time

so that's why it's appealing to me

[ivory verge]

yeah

[delicate delta]

and marmoset toolbag's ability to generate normal, bump, texture colors and height maps with a brush and built in easy baking is also really neat and makes sense to me, whereas I often feel lost in blender

[ivory verge]

baking in blender feels cumbersome, but i also only done it twice

[delicate delta]

I like these more specialized tools in addition to using blender

they are also affordable imo

like I would love to use adobe cloud but I can't justify the expense

it costs way too much

but a couple hundred dollars for tools I plan to use all the time I am willing to pay that idk

[ivory verge]

yeah

i pay for the full jetbrains suite, i think its worth the money, and its good stuff

[delicate delta]

I used to

I think for desktop application software intellij is great, if you want to work on remote servers it really falls flat and I can't use it for that

so I stopped paying

[ivory verge]

ah i have no reason to write code or compile shit remotely

[delicate delta]

my job requires it

[ivory verge]

i write it locally, and have it deployed via cicd

[delicate delta]

I can't run our dev env locally, it's a full kubernetes cluster

I am going to switch to zed

for my editing

now that it compiles on windows

[ivory verge]

vscode has ssh/docker/wsl capabilities too

[delicate delta]

yeah I use vs code for work, it's very good

I use vs code for everything right now

zed is getting remote ssh too, but it's in beta and didn't work well last time I tried it

[ivory verge]

personally i think zed is a waste of time, but its written in rust so everyone is flocking to it 🙂

[delicate delta]

I just want software that isn't running in a browser

[ivory verge]

vscode is very optimized and backed by a multibillion dollhair company

although they seem to push this copilot bs quite a bit now

[delicate delta]

yeah I don't have any performance issues with vs code

if I don't think zed is good I can just go back

Im going to try and attach visual studio to my running executable to see if I can use it to monitor memory usage

it's the one thing I haven't figured out yet

a good tool to spot memory leaks and usage

[ivory verge]

you are on windows neh?

[delicate delta]

yes

[ivory verge]

when are you moving to arch? 🙂

like demon, he does it for the cool valve looking uisms 😄

[delicate delta]

I just want a linux thing to test on, I'm not moving

:P

[ivory verge]

hehe

[elder kettle]

It should be comfortable enough to dev on though

It's not completely trivial to get things working cross platform

[delicate delta]

if you just use blender and gimp

sure

[elder kettle]

It's the programming toolchain

[ivory verge]

its quite simple on windows actually, to get a whole linux chain going, including X11 if you want window-windows

[elder kettle]

ah yeah that's true

I would just use an old laptop and make a native install though

[delicate delta]

I liked xfce and windowless managers when I was using linux

[ivory verge]

yeah

[delicate delta]

I could do most of my dev on linux for sure

I do at work already

[ivory verge]

xfce is what i fly too

[elder kettle]

ah alright

[delicate delta]

it's been awhile, last time I had a linux desktop was in 2007 and it was slackware

jfc visual studio takes forever to update

also it's confusing that some things are nu packages, and other things are visual studio installer updates

it's weird

actually there is the visual studio installer packages, the visual studio extension system, and then nu package manager

instead of there just being one thing there's three

I guess I get a package system being different, that's more project dependencies and not part of the ide

but that's mitigated by visual studio installation changes being needed to build projects, so they are project dependencies though

[ivory verge]

that gives me nightmares

i have a work laptop for the shop i work for atm

[delicate delta]

took a good 15 minutes

[ivory verge]

and its locked down with some BeyondTrust bs root kit

whenever i want to update VS, i have to enter my credentials, n amount of times vs uninstalls all packages and then n amount of times it installs all those vs packages. its ~350-400 times

[delicate delta]

yeah I have to use a yubikey to do stuff on my work macbook

I have a locked down macbook, and then even more locked down chromebook for access to production systems

[ivory verge]

yeah

[delicate delta]

and I have to carry both around with me all the time

[ivory verge]

it does make sense but it also doesnt make any sense at the same time

[delicate delta]

I hate that chromebook

but access to production system is hardware linked + yubikey + my credentials

the joy of working at a security company

[ivory verge]

all the banks i had access too 😄