Had the itch to get back to basics with graphics this week so I wrote a software rasterizer in Rust. The rasterizer SIMD approach is based on @rygorous 's excellent tutorial series here: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/optimizing-sw-occlusion-culling-index/

Plenty of work to do like some kind of multithreading scheme and perhaps even textures. But it's always satisfying to see shaded triangles. I'll share the code at some point if I clean it up

Vulkan and Win32 APIs ready.
Time to mov some data
#Vulkan #Assembly #GameDev #EngineDev #Debugging #Handmade #LowLevel #masm64 #gametech #graphicsprogramming #vulkanengine

Just added Vulkan validation layers and debug callbacks to my assembly-based engine! Catching issues before they crash—because debugging raw x64 is fun, but not that fun.
#Vulkan #Assembly #GameDev #EngineDev #Debugging #Handmade #LowLevel #masm64 #gametech #graphicsprogramming #vulkanengine

500 lines of pure x64 assembly.
Just to create a Vulkan instance.
No helpers. No C. No safety nets. Just raw MASM64 and the Vulkan headers.

This is what low-level graphics looks like when you go all the way down.
Next up: surface and device creation.

https://github.com/IbrahimHindawi/masm64-vulkan

I've set up a Github repository to build Google ANGLE binaries for Mac (Metal), iOS (Metal) and Windows (D3D11) automatically.

These are going to be used with my engine Ceramic (using GLES3 for rendering), but other engine or game developers might be interested too

#gamedev #graphicsprogramming

https://github.com/jeremyfa/build-angle

Shader Programmers:
Are vector ops more efficient than scalar (ie if I add two float4s is that the same cost as adding two floats) or did that stop being a thing 15 years ago?

It's been a while since I last showed the progress on my #audio waveform viewer here. The waveform display widget itself is slowly reaching quality levels I'm happy with - switching from software rendering to #OpenGL has really worked wonders for both the speed and the quality of the waveform rendering.

Now I just gotta write the rest of the app around it...

I'm only part way through it, but this blog post about creating Rick and Morty animations with SDFs is super interesting.

https://danielchasehooper.com/posts/code-animated-rick/

I went out of my way to get this copy of GPU Gems from the Internet Archive onto my e-reader and have it look good. It took me three days of messing around.

https://archive.org/details/gpugemsprogrammi0000unse

This device would be landfill if it weren't for KOReader, which renders pages ten times faster than the official app.

https://koreader.rocks

mfw DirectX doesn't have proper line rendering
no glLineWidth()
no GL_LINES_SMOOTH
just ugly lines
this explains a lot

The word "Shader" keeps bugging me. Like, I can imagine why it's called that way historically, but it's way more than just to put shades on stuff (or even manipulate single entities). Yet my head can't unlink that connection when I see the word, I immediately got the picture in my head of a plain 2000's 3D era rock that gets upgraded to a 2024's 3D era rock.

Is it just me who's bugged by that? Or is it perhaps due to English not being my native language?
#GameDev #Shader #GraphicsProgramming

https://www.khronos.org/news/press/khronos-streamlines-development-and-deployment-of-gpu-accelerated-applications-with-vulkan-1.4

Yesterday, my students presented our work at the ACM ASSETS conference. "Not Only Annpying. But Dangerous": Devising an Ecology of Protections for Photosensitive Social Media Users" https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3663548.3675610

In this study, we investigate prior work, conduct survey inquiries, and use co-design methods to explore how social media design choices influence exposure to dangerous flashing content which can trigger seizures, migraines, nausea, and disorientation for photosensitive users.

Through our analysis, we identify the current ecosystem of flashing content on the Internet, and propose a more robust ecology of protections, including on-device graphics filters that directly edit pixels buffers to prevent flashing before it occurs.

First, existing WCAG guidelines against auto-play of media need to be enforced. Second, users should have device level control over animation that may trigger flashing, and this control shpuld not be able to be reset by platforms that try to enforce autoplay to support their own ad revenue. Third, other users need to be aware of what makes content dangerous, so thay they may stop circulating it and causing accidental exposure. Fourth, creators need to know what makes content dangerous, and how they can test for danger, to prevent them from creating dangerous media in the first place. This includes corporate creators, like movie studios, whose ads for acrion movies have been a recent source of autoplaying strobing content in movie trailors posted via ad platforms. Fifth, platforms, including GIF libraries, but also all social platforms, need to implement reporting mechanisms specifically for flashing content which can remove that content from circulation. Sixth, there should be actual penalties for platforms and creators that do not react to, correct, and remove dangerous content, or who force auto-play on users.

And seventh, device manufacturers and operating system developers need to create on-device filters that eliminate flashing through simple real time post-processing. Machine Learning classification and prediction algorithms ARE NOT NECESSARY. We can do this with simple math. Yes it may sometimes look weird. But also people won't be dying in their sleep.

This work is very important to me, and I've been working on it (on the side) since 2017. I wasn't allowed to pursue it fully as a graduate student. As faculty, I still had to string the project together on wishes. And I'm still looking for a collaborator to work on the implementation, though if industry would just get their shit together and do it themselves, that'd be great.

i made some cubes

"... we look through the recent Radiance Cascades paper from the devs of Path of Exile 2, explore the ideas behind their approach ..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3so7xdZHKxw

"Radiance Cascades: New Approach to Calculating Global Illumination"
Paper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L6v1_7HY2X-LV3Ofb6oyTIxgEaP4LOI6/view

Older article /w video: https://80.lv/articles/radiance-cascades-new-approach-to-calculating-global-illumination/

Oh boy, another project and another triangle. I was thinking that maybe make rythm game from "scrath" (not using an existing engine). I have doubts that I'll make it far. However, this time I'm going to document the process so that I can some day go back and look at these posts and maybe learn from my mistakes.

Wish me luck I guess.

*Et voilà!*

New article in my ongoing Recreating Nanite series: Mesh shader time!

https://jglrxavpok.github.io/2024/05/13/recreating-nanite-mesh-shader-time.html

* May contain trace amounts of GPU Traces.

My #FOSDEM talk has been released!
It's about the @TinyGo smartwatch that I've been working on, including how I made testing the firmware as simple as "go run" and how I've made the display as fast as I could.

https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2562-smartwatch-firmware-in-go-on-tinygo-small-displays-and-building-a-delightful-developer-experience/

I've posted my progress on Mastodon so if you're curious just take a look at my older posts.