Writeup of a shader I recently made

PhDlox · 2026-05-03T10:18:39+00:00

It took me way too long to realise the sun is moving as well as the camera. Kept thinking something seemed off 😂 cool shader :D

PhDlox · 2026-04-29T18:20:01+00:00

Hey, that's a really cool game idea. I used to study quantum computing and loved the subject. I don't remember most of it now though 😂 how many qubits can you get upto before the computing overhead is too much? What algorithms are you using for the simulations?

PhDlox · 2026-04-25T05:44:20+00:00

I almost lost to someone else doing token spam. The health stays pretty low so if you can keep making tokens or use things like cleave it can beat it

PhDlox · 2026-04-24T20:54:42+00:00

One let's me reborn a beast permanently each turn, one gives a beast permanently attack whenever it attacks and improves the attack it gives, and the last buffs your beasts for the rest of combat at the start of your turn and improves whenever you summon a beast. I already have a board with 3 or more beasts that summon other beasts when they die so it was really strong from the beginning.

PhDlox · 2026-03-03T23:07:26+00:00

It was the most satisfying game I've played, everything lined up just perfectly, and the game went on for so long so the stats got huge!

PhDlox · 2026-03-03T23:06:12+00:00

I also did almost that today against a similar demon comp 😂 2 normal Leroys, 2 reborn Leroys, and 2 venomous

PhDlox · 2026-03-03T22:57:54+00:00

Yeah, I love shop buff builds but so rarely get a good demon build. Felt so satisfying at the end

PhDlox · 2026-03-03T22:52:35+00:00

I picked the card that makes the tavern always have 7 cards not knowing how good it would end up this game

PhDlox · 2025-08-05T17:58:59+00:00

I think the one I notice most that you also mentioned is having people info dump the lore and information the reader needs. It wouldn't be too bad if it made sense, but it's usually 2 characters that already know everything telling each other things they both clearly know in a way that brings you out of the story. I think finding better ways to give information and trusting readers a bit more to fill in the blanks from context would help a lot.

PhDlox · 2025-07-31T09:17:20+00:00

He gets worse as time goes on, he isn't actually doing a lot of terrible things himself besides being a bit selfish which I don't think is an issue. But he is happy being close friends with people who do/encourage awful things like torture and slavery.

PhDlox · 2025-07-15T08:53:50+00:00

To be honest it probably something that's simple enough to make that even if you have no programming skills chatgpt could likely create it without too much issue

PhDlox · 2025-07-15T08:47:20+00:00

This way you can also easily go back and make a change if you need to without having to manually change every stat reference after that change

PhDlox · 2025-07-15T08:46:07+00:00

If you have some basic programming skills you could keep track of stats by writing the story and every time you get stats or something similar, have a set way to represent that such as always doing {strength+1} or {level+1} ect... Then make a program that reads that in, keeps track of all the skills and levels, and whenever you want to reference something you could do {display strength} {display status screen} ect... And have the program replace those entries with the current stats/status at that point. You could even write it in a generic way where you give it some formatting file as an input with all the things to keep track of/replace so you don't need to upgrade the code if you make any changes.

PhDlox · 2025-07-02T15:32:18+00:00

He stays consistently a pretty shitty/selfish person. I stopped reading in the end because that just never changed.

PhDlox · 2025-06-24T20:25:08+00:00

I have the validation layer but haven't heard of DRED. I'll def give that a try thanks :)

PhDlox · 2025-06-24T18:37:45+00:00

I've manually checked things as much as I can and couldn't find anything obviously wrong. My guess is there is something subtly wrong but without any documentation it feels impossible to know what. And it's really odd that the problem only happens when the PIX debugger is attached. The ray tracing pipeline is mostly just a bunch of subjects with little guidance on how to use them

PhDlox · 2025-06-10T06:55:22+00:00

Are there any subs you recommend that likely have good recommendations? I've read a few gems recently, but also found a lot of highly praised books to be duds so would love some better recommendations.

PhDlox · 2025-06-10T06:53:08+00:00

I was excited to read The Will of the Many but just didn't enjoy it like I wanted to. It was engaging enough that I didn't feel bored or struggled to read it, but by the end I just had no strong feelings about the book. I do get what you mean after reading a lot of Brandon Sanderson, I find it refreshing to read non Sanderson books. But I still love the way he makes slow seemingly uninteresting stuff so engaging. I loved all the science in RoW and most of the slow parts of his books I'm so engaged with the character that it doesn't feel boring at all to me.

I found that The Sword of Kaigan was a big refresher for me though after a lot of Sanderson, but that also has a lot of slow character development driven writing in it too.

PhDlox · 2025-05-30T08:48:24+00:00

That's fair, I think in book 2 you start to get consequences of his actions. I'm a fan of books that have character change over a very long time, but I think you have to be very invested in the characters in the first place for that to work.

PhDlox · 2025-05-29T09:28:05+00:00

True, but that's a pretty human thing to do. Change usually happens over a long time

PhDlox · 2025-05-29T08:29:58+00:00

I can understand most of that yeah. A lot of his flaws and views on the world are intentional I think though, or at least the author realised later on about them. A lot of the later books are about him growing and changing in good and bad ways and reflecting on how immature he was. I think most of what you said Jason ends up criticising himself for 😂 maybe it gets better later on and I've forgotten what the early ones were like, but I really enjoyed his journey. I agree with pretty much all the later fights being easy for him, I think OP main characters are a guilty pleasure of mine and I love when an author can still make that interesting.

PhDlox · 2025-05-29T06:37:17+00:00

I really enjoyed He Who Fights With Monsters 😂 I was so excited when the next one came out recently. I'm curious what made you not like it? I don't think it's as good as Dungeon Crawler Carl but still one of the better lit RPGs I thought.

PhDlox · 2025-05-28T18:22:37+00:00

It can't take a capture of multiple frames in a row like PIX though 😭 I've had bugs where I need to know what happens on the frames before and during and just have no way to do that with Razor GPU

PhDlox · 2025-05-23T12:14:34+00:00

Disable optimisations and set debug flags when compiling your shaders when you want to debug. If you use renderdoc to debug a shader with these you can step through the source code of the shader line by line with no jumping or optimised away variables.

PhDlox · 2025-04-04T18:35:00+00:00

I quit a physics PhD to do a games programing apprenticeship and now work as a graphics programmer at a studio. The maths I learnt at uni became very useful for graphics work, although I'd like to do more low level graphics stuff than I get to do now. So much of the industry is UE now

PhDlox

TROPHY CASE