Programming, Graphics, Gamedev, Exotic Computation, Audio Synthesis
I get asked fairly often what people need to know to be hireable as a graphics programmer. I figured it was time to make a page to link instead of re-typing it each time. We are in a strange time with LLMs. I think ML as it is right now won t live up to the Continue reading
My name is Alan Wolfe, and I m a game and engine programmer with over 25 years of experience. I m also a graphics researcher with patents, published papers, book chapters, and conference presentations. Lastly, I am the creator of the open-source rapid graphics R D platform, Gigi (https://github.com/electronicarts/gigi), which demonstrates the future of real time render pipelines Continue reading
I recently watched a great 16 minute YouTube video on the basics of information theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkLHszLlH34. The video shows the link between probability and information entropy and a great takeaway from it is that you can use these concepts to decide what kind of experiments to do, to get as much information as possible. This Continue reading
This article explains how these four things fit together and shows some examples of what they are used for. Derivatives Derivatives are the most fundamental concept in calculus. If you have a function, a derivative tells you how much that function changes at each point. If we start with the function , we can calculate Continue reading
The code that made the diagrams in this post can be found at https://github.com/Atrix256/ToroidalProgressiveStratification1D I stumbled on this when working on something else. I m not sure of a use case for it, but I want to share it in case there is one I m not thinking of, or in case it inspires other ideas. Let s Continue reading
The noise textures used in this post, and the python scripts used to generate the diagrams, can be found on github at https://github.com/Atrix256/Threshold_STBN_FAST Thresholding blue noise textures can be a decent way of getting blue noise points at runtime in real-time rendering. They aren t the highest quality point sets, but they are fast to make Continue reading
When looking at the politics of the American right and the American left, there is no contest for me as to which to support, if these are my only options. I see the right doing hateful, authoritarian things that seem to violate their own principles. They violate their religious principles as a largely Christian group Continue reading
FYI this blog is proudly woke: Trans rights are human rights, Israel needs to stop the genocide in Palestine, Trump is everything the founding fathers of the USA were trying to protect the country against, and black lives matter. Still here? Cool. Hello and welcome! Imagine you sit down to board game night, pop open Continue reading
I stumbled across a very cool YouTube video today that talks about how to look for alternate ways of labeling sides of two dice to give you the same random number distribution as if you added two standard dice together. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVRRykIyll0 Making customized dice give desired probability distributions is an interesting topic (like for game Continue reading
In this post I ll be showing two different ways to scale points along a specific direction (a vector). There isn t anything novel here, but it gives an example of the type of math encountered in game development, and how you might approach a solution. The first method involves matrices, and the second involves vector projections. Continue reading