Outline Rendering When an entity was hovered or selected, I overlaid a white color on it, making it pretty difficult to see the material beneath. I survived one year li…

How much time I spend looking at selected entities in my editor!? A lot! From splash overlays to nice outlines, and it was pretty cool and relaxing to make! fomenko.fr/devlogs/outl... #gamedev

I refactored lot of rendering code recently, aiming for greater simplicity in general. I changed the shape of my renderer, and how I load assets in the game, how I send materials textures to the shaders... and more; I wrapped up everything in this post: fomenko.fr/devlogs/big-...

On dit que cet endroit est le bout du monde, que comme la vie, il n’y a rien après. Que seul les désemparés venaient se perdre ici à tout jamais. #indiedev #gamedev #indiegames #screenshotsaturday

They say this place is the end of the world, that like life there is nothing after. Only the forsaken came here to lose themselves for eternity. #indiedev #gamedev #indiegames #screenshotsaturday

Edgar contemple les tombes et les mausolées. On dit que les dieux sont enterrés ici. Bien loin de la cacophonie des batailles à leurs noms. Jadis, lui aussi se battait pour l’un d’eux. Les dieux sont partis depuis fort longtemps, seules les pierres survivent à la folie des hommes.

Edgar gazes upon the graves and mausoleums. They say the gods are buried here. Far away from the cacophony of battles fought in their names. Once, he too fought for one of them. The gods have been gone for ages, and only the stones outlast the madness of men.

Des dédales à n’en plus finir et le temps qui semble s’être arrêté depuis une éternité. Edgar poursuit son chemin, cela fait des jours qu’il navigue à l’aveugle la région du Roi Fou...

A tangled path without end, and time that seems to have stopped for an eternity. Edgar continues on his way; it has been days that he has wandered blindly through the region of the Mad King...

The main issue is how I blend probes. It’s too simple right now, and the grid becomes visible when nearby probes fluctuate between cells. It’s worse with sparse probes. I’ll try something new soon! But I want to avoids building a tetrahedral volume like big engines do...

To easily get the surrounding probes from shaders, all probes are spatialized in a 5x5x5 grid. Still, I have to sort them in the shader to find the nearest four probes among the surrounding ones, and that’s not great and bloats performance right now.

How it works: I place probes in the scene, which are just entities from my editor’s point of view. The baking system is pretty simple: I raycast a few times from each probe to get the irradiance of surrounding objects, then aggregate the results and store them as 9 spherical harmonic coefficients.

I took a few days to dive into how I could compute indirect lighting in my game, and it was easier than I thought to get a working system. I like the result, it already adds a lot to the scene. But it still needs more work! #screenshotsaturday #gamedev

Early this week, I added a few things to the profiler I’m using in the codebase, including sorting, navigating the hierarchy, in the code being able to customize the name of the area, and a visual line display. It’s entirely based on the Iprof runtime code. #screenshotsaturday #gamedev

For today, I don’t have much to show; I lost my mind with this spatial grid optimization... pure rabbit hole. In the end, it’s not worth it for mesh culling (at the moment), but definitely worth it for querying the near entities for collision detection and raycasting! #screenshotsaturday #gamedev

Also, the SSAO target texture is now half the size of the framebuffer, then upscaled later. This resulted in a significant performance gain with almost no visual cost.

After a few days optimizing the way I was gathering and sending objects to the GPU, the game is running smoothly again. It’s a relief, also the big step forward now would be to use some spatial grid algorithm, but that’s for another time! #gamedev

Thanks; it's a symbol, a totem, a direction even, of the game I'm trying to make.

Painting the ground... #screenshotsaturday #gamedev

That was a super interesting talk, thank you very much! Indeed, probably a bit of overkill for now, but there's some clever tricks there, like reusing/cached ray projections, how they blend probes...

Engine Work: Global Illumination with Irradiance Probes Global illumination is one key effect I want to achieve with Monter. For a low-poly style game, G…

One of the most insightful articles I’ve come across on implementing a lighting probe system: handmade.network/p/75/monter/...

I’m also open to suggestions for other papers or blogs on this topic. #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

And the more I read about lighting probes, the more I’m thinking that I could scratch a basic implementation in a week, but I don’t want to fall into some kind of rabbit hole...

I’m thinking about basic irradiance probes, it could be a good enough solution (at least for now). Each probe would be an individual entity, and could be placed manually at first. The results of the computed irradiance are easily serialized too.

The game is largely populated by static entities, so baking lightmaps would probably give the best result. But it’s also pretty complex to implement in the current engine right now...

I’m starting to think of ways to take into account indirect lighting in the game. It would have a great impact on the overall feeling. #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

I definitely want a darker tone for Oleg, but the art direction is still not the priority right now.

What has been very hard, and I suppose will remain so for a long time, is finding a way to bring together everything a game is made of into a cohesive whole. #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

And I judge how good a programing language is, through this exact metric: Its ability to let me stay in that flow, in that process.

The way I like to experience programming is by compulsively molding the code and logic on the fly. At first, it’s always chaotic and messy, I compile and run my program like a maniac, and I like that. Everything will eventually takes its final form naturally. I trust the process for that.

I think Jai and Zig have quite different end goals, but their common ground, in my opinion, is that both are languages that do not compromise on performance. Beyond that, they don’t share much.

At some point, I’ll share more about my experiences with Jai. It’s been my main programming language for the past two years, and it honestly feels like it was designed to match how my brain works.