DevOps

UE5 Shader Optimization: Materials, Custom HLSL, and Global Shaders with RDG

When a material graph grows in Unreal Engine 5, it is tempting to ask: would writing HLSL directly make it faster? Would implementing the shader in…

I built a small C++ game engine so an AI IDE could touch the whole thing

Originally posted on Medium . I wanted to make a game. I also wanted the AI IDE on my desk to edit the whole running process, not just the scripts.…

Unity Mipmaps Beyond Smaller Textures: Temporal Stability, Streaming, and Semantic Mips

Introduction Mipmaps are usually introduced as smaller copies of a texture. That is correct, but it does not explain why a no-mipmap screenshot look…

Converting SVG strokes to fills in the browser: the geometry problem nobody warns you about

A while back I was building an icon font with IcoMoon. I dragged in my SVGs, hit generate, and about half the icons came out wrong — hollow outlines…

The Great Ubuntu Blackout: My 3-Hour Journey to Fix the Darkness

Introduction It was a perfectly normal day. I opened my laptop, ready to get some work done, and then... BAM. A black screen. Not a gentle fade to b…

V.E.L.O.C.I.T.Y.-OS: The Synaptic Canvas GUI & V-NCE GPU (Part 10)

After writing drivers for NVMe storage, my bare-metal kernel could load files and run JIT code. However, I was still typing commands into a text-onl…

Point Cloud Sound for irregular shaped audio sources

Putting your live windows on an infinite canvas: the "park & swap" trick (C++ / WGC / D3D11)

The problem Alt-tab and multiple monitors are how we've juggled windows for 30 years. I wanted something spatial: zoom out, see every window at once…

Procedurally generating marble dice textures with simplex noise

I built a 3D dice roller as a Chrome extension and wanted dice that look like the marbled Chessex ones — those rich, swirling, Old-World-stone dice…