A video game studio.
This post is an overview of my choices when programming my own GUI library, this is not a tutorial. It’s been a while since I wanted to own the GUI stack, despite having experience with making GUIs from scratch, I never had the time to properly pause what I was doing and be a bit serious with it. But for the past month or so, I was making exactly this, a GUI library, which is now what I use for my…
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 like that. Also, I needed to have outlines for interactive objects in the game, so it was time to add them. I had multiple constraints as well; respecting the mesh silhouette, being able to merge silhouettes together when more than one is selected, and…
On the couch, Saturday night, and a dim light flickers and warm up the mood of my room’s wall. Waiting midnight, like an owl, like a bat, like those stray cats watching society get drunk from a far up roof. It’s calm here, and far away, a bomb explode who knows where. Stream of thoughts, and I change stuff in the code, and it compiles, and I yawn and the computer is not tired, never ever.…
Those last few days I got distracted with rendering stuff. It was overly too complex, and now that I’m back being by myself on the project, it was time to think on how to make the code as simple as possible, and have a sense that everything is under control. Meanwhile, for my current client, I’m dealing with d3d11 and I kinda like the API. It’s been a while since I didn’t play with a graphic API…
Crowded coffee shop, it’s 2pm, white cloudy sky, berlin during winter. Hard to find these days, those places where laptops are allowed. I need my caffeine, and a chocolate cake, and some bright natural light you know, cacophony of the day to day life. I'm lost in my own fucking labyrinth, I’m questioning my ability to even continuing Oleg; nothing makes sense, I’m blocked. I don’t want to go…
A vector magnitude is a few adds and multiplies, but mainly a square root; and that last bit is expensive, particularly when you're doing it inside a loop over thousands of entities, possibly multiple times per frame. In reality, we use a vector’s magnitude in lots of different contexts. For example (and this happens a lot), grabbing the entity closest to the player, like this: length :: (…
For a while we've been writing graphics rendering code twice, for both Metal and OpenGL. I was tired of maintaining two different backends that want to do the same thing, and since december I started writing a graphics abstraction layer as a side project. Last month we decided to integrate it into the game. The idea was to provide an API for writing graphics code that was similar to Metal…
It’s been a while since I wanted to revisit our game’s collision-detection system to give it a little boost, but I dragged my feet before rolling up my sleeves; anything to do with collisions always fries my brain. What we had before was fairly simple, and in itself worked pretty well, without any major glitches. But the constraints on player movement were becoming too severe, so something had to…