Hi everyone!

I apologize for the extended period of silence. I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy. I've gathered a number of very exciting announcements!



HMN Lisp Jam

Recently, on the Handmade Network Discord, we've been having some discussions about metaprogramming and using code as data. It should come to no surprise to those familiar with the topic that Lisp has come up. Lisp offers tools for this idea to a much stronger degree than, say, C. Treating code like ordinary data is an immensely powerful technique that is helpful even when doing C programming, and allows one ... Read More →

Floating-point operations in 3D geometry transformations aren't bit-exact between different computers rendering the sprites, but version history tools are very picky about serialized rounding errors. The sprite generation tool will now look at existing sprites and tolerate a certain deviation before deciding to overwrite existing files, so that rounding errors will no longer cause random sprites to be overwritten and bloat the version history. A fuzzy text comparison function parses all numbers to check the numerical differences. Read More →

Over the past month I've been doing pretty much nothing except bug fixes and sound design. I'm getting closer to having a section of the game at a level that I'm happy to show off, but it's still probably a couple more weeks away. My process for fixing bugs and polishing the game is just playing through it, writing down stuff that needs to be fixed or improved, fixing those things mostly in the order that they were written down in, and then crossing those out once they're done. I've also been working on making sure the game works at ... Read More →

Continuing from last post, DDGI requires a high amount of memory to store its depth maps. I present a compression scheme that compresses the data to 5~10% of its original size. Note this is completely orthogonal to BC texture compression or any bit-saving tricks, so this compression ratio can be improved further with those existing techniques.

Memory Constraint

For DDGI to work effectively, we need a 16x16 depth map attached to each probe, with each texel storing both depth and depth^2. If we use R16G16 to store each texel, then that would give us 1KB per probe, not counting ... Read More →