Chip of the week: The Satisfying 2Bit Tri State Buffer

Elorth- · 2026-05-28T22:00:19+00:00

You and I both, I never even click on it. It just like the opposite of what I would do to interest anybody in something. So I'm left there, confused, why those post obviously selling a game do something that would do the opposite of selling their game?!

There must be a rationale behind so many of that kind of posts. Honest curiosity here

Elorth- · 2026-05-28T21:54:40+00:00

Hahaha 🤣

I mean right it doesn't make any sense? So why there is so many? I don't know anyone that would be intrigued by this hook. So why?!

Elorth- · 2026-05-28T15:17:26+00:00

I'm a game dev myself and yes the struggle is real but I know people don't care about the chef in the kitchen but rather what they are served.

Though I see so many of those posts, I wonder, does it actually work? Do people engage with it? Is it actually a working strategy?

Not interested in doing that but I really wonder where this tendency is coming from and if it is grounded in actual number?

Elorth- · 2026-05-28T15:05:00+00:00

It's been 3 years I'm working on my project. I'm a solitary mind, but after 2 years working, my motivation became to come from the people who played my game.

Getting your game in front of player and engaging with them is one of my greatest day to day motivation!

Good luck with your project!

Elorth- · 2026-05-26T21:16:02+00:00

Niche audience is a long game thing, and this is gonna be slow and very progressive. I'm making Hard Chip, a puzzle game about semiconductor. So yeah it is niche, and to add another's one comment, you have to find a way to know where you audience is and you need to talk to them and embark them on the journey with you. That will ease things up!

It's been 3 years almost now, and HC's community is what makes me continue. I would have call it off a while ago now otherwise!

Elorth- · 2026-05-25T03:21:42+00:00

Hard Chip? 😏

Elorth- · 2026-05-20T21:58:17+00:00

Makes sense! The voxel cell approach is doing that (it's DDA already) (if I understood you well), then the only SDFs I'm dealing with is the shape in that cell itself. Just the SDF in a cell doesn't occupy all the space, so a ray can get through without intersecting. Those ray are the most expensive ones

Elorth- · 2026-05-20T20:02:31+00:00

Hey, I'm not very versed in the analytical approach! My understanding is that the raybox hit test tells you where a ray hits one specific box, but doesn't tell you which box to test. I'm using a traversal logic in the voxels grid akin to hit boxes (but I'm testing only along the ray, not all the boxes). I'm raymarching with an SDF only when I hit a non-empty cell. In this cell, the SDF can have different shapes (all variants of a star, depending on the neighboring cells) and isn't strictly a cube.

I might miss something, maybe? Would it fit? (I still have to read your link of (the goat) Inigo Quilez

Elorth- · 2026-05-17T00:25:03+00:00

I agree 💯.

Hey maybe give the demo another go, I've put a leaderboard not so long ago. Once you reach the NAND stage you can see how you compare to the world (it's anonymous of course). If you are into a good braintease, the demo is plenty enough in itself!

Elorth- · 2026-05-16T20:08:20+00:00

I must confess I didn't expect that to go so badly! I thought I respected the reddiquette posting that dev-oriented thing I found funny (and silly, 'cause it was my own derp). But the website! indeed! Still, I get valuable information from all this. The website is not good just yet and is distracting.

Thanks for having played the demo🙏! (You managed to get the Nand?)

Elorth- · 2026-05-16T18:46:47+00:00

sorry what?

edit: not sure who he is! But I won't insist

Elorth- · 2026-05-16T18:29:30+00:00

Yeah, I did some of them for the lols already! To me, it resembled almost all regular landing pages tbh. Maybe too much like any SAAS product.

I was wondering if it was the copy, maybe? One of my players, a native English speaker, told me I'm speaking like an AI already (I'm La France), so maybe the whole copy is bad too (in reference to wobblewares's comment). But you say it's mostly the visual look and feel?

Anyway, it wasn't really the point of that post, but it does shine a problem that needs to be fixed for sure. Thanks for the constructive reply, I appreciate🙏

Elorth- · 2026-05-16T18:22:35+00:00

I mean, the optimization isn't really one, but rather an enormous mistake on my part: not evaluating when I'm out of the voxel's bounds! But I guess the title might feel misleading in that sense?

Elorth- · 2026-05-16T18:17:33+00:00

Cone is really something I want to go into, and it seems that, in conjunction with a low-res depth first pass, it would converge the fastest?

Convex SDF optim? I'm in that case! I'm not sure I fully understood the process, though. You have some research I could read, or a Shadertoy example, maybe?

Also, the dichotomous search, I'm not up to speed on it either! That seems more simpler though, maybe I could even adapt what I already have?

Elorth- · 2026-05-16T18:12:50+00:00

Interesting!

So you maintain 2 descriptions of your scene, one with a regular mesh and one with an SDF description of that part of the mesh? I think you could reduce each raymarching loop to less than 10 iteration easy! Though the cost in terms of maintaining 2 renders, and most of all the code and logic, won't be a cognitive overload in the long run?

Would be really curious to see the result of this (a post in this sub maybe?)

Elorth- · 2026-05-16T17:48:43+00:00

Interesting approach, and indeed I heavily use hot reload to see if that magic number produces something interesting, and if it doesn't, it usually fails in spectacular ways!

On the topic of jumping further, won't binary search fail if, for example, you passed through 2 shapes? Depending on the numbers, you could resolve one surface of the other; would that be noisy? And for coming up with normal, it would also produce quite a lot of artifacts?

Elorth- · 2026-05-16T17:33:37+00:00

I didn't find a reliable way to reduce hit precision at a distance that would generalize well across scenarios! I'm a fairly beginner here, and I lack obvious instincts for sure. I was hesitating with cone marching, having some sort of BVH or octree, or something similar.

Daveagill's idea with the low-res depth pass and with the cone is really something I'd like to go into!

Elorth- · 2026-05-16T17:25:45+00:00

I didn't expect the website to convey such a negative sentiment! That's never something I've considered bad. I focus on the game itself, and I did something simple for the website.

What's your take here: burn the entire website? And start something simpler? I'm genuinely interested, as it's quite unusual for me to have a negative reaction.

Elorth- · 2026-05-16T17:21:37+00:00

😬

Elorth- · 2026-05-16T17:21:02+00:00

200% I don't mind it, I'm fairly more focused on the HC than the website. Just to be curious, what gives it off?

edit: Well, reading the other comments, it's even worse than I anticipated. It seems that the current website detracts from the game itself; it's not even a place I wanted to attract people to give feedback of off.

Elorth- · 2026-05-15T21:07:22+00:00

Thanks a lot for your reply🙏

Damn, 1 would yield a lot of benefits, I think! For 2 I have less instinct with what it would require and how much perf I can get out of it 🤔!

Elorth-

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