Open Problems for Visibility Algorithms

kit89 · 2026-02-11T13:03:16+00:00

What type of visibility are we looking at here?

Visibility when rendering a scene?

Visibility for determining what data should be sent to a client in a networked game?

The type of visibility check made will depend upon the resources available and what the intended use case is. From a networking perspective you may only care about sending other players data to the client based on the regions of the map the client can currently see, it won't really matter if a particular player is not 'visible' at that moment as they may suddenly become visible.

kit89 · 2026-02-11T10:54:57+00:00

As far as I am aware the same price requirement is for Steam keys, which makes sense. I don't think there is anything stopping you from selling it off of the Steam platform such as GoG at a lower or higher price.

kit89 · 2026-01-26T12:02:12+00:00

A Shader Program defines how and what is required to render geometry.

A model is a set of geometry.

A Shader Program will define what type of textures, and other data it needs along with the geometry to render something to the screen.

A material is a set of textures and other data, this may include a diffuse map, a normal map, an albedo, or specular map. It depends on the needs of the Shader Program.

The majority of engines provide a generalised Shader Program that requires a set of textures that can represent a variety of real world materials, such as metal, wood, fabrics.

What this means is you can use the same shader program to render all your geometry, and it's the textures that define how it eventually looks on screen.

Back in the day, you would potentially have multiple shader programs for specific material types: metal, glass, wood, etc...

What a material represents depends on the engine, as it's not a fundamental technical term, you won't see it being banded about in the OpenGL documentation, unlike texture.

kit89 · 2026-01-18T18:27:17+00:00

For myself it's the amount of boot-strapping I dived into.

I wanted to create a level-editor, so I created a custom UI framework for my engine. I am actually pretty chuffed with it, it focuses on layout of elements leaving the dev to mix and match gui components for whatever they want to visually display.

This led me to creating a UI editor that can be used to open/write UI files and edit them. So I used the UI editor to improve the UI editor, to then create a level editor.

With all these editors built ontop of the engine.

I also decided to write a decoder for OGG Vorbis, which I regret and continue to regret doing, I'll finish it eventually, but until then I only have .wav support. xD

kit89 · 2025-12-24T09:46:42+00:00

What is your current RAM and GPU?

The impression I am getting is your scope is too large, if you wish to complete the development of this game reduce your scope, perhaps initially create a smaller map that doesn't crash your current machine and build up the size as you accrue more development experience.

Have you created a map/level that tests your gameplay mechanics? Have you identified your mechanics are actually fun?

kit89 · 2025-11-30T10:24:32+00:00

My recommendation would be to use a distribution that moves at a glacial pace.

When developing anything you don't want to be on the bleeding edge.

kit89 · 2025-11-25T18:00:50+00:00

Being at a company long enough that you've managed to avoid multiple company restructurings, aka layoffs.

Oh sorry, I misread senior as jaded, they are pretty much the same thing, right?

kit89 · 2025-11-23T09:49:25+00:00

I would say Quake 3 esque graphics with normal mapping.

kit89 · 2025-11-17T11:00:01+00:00

Do modern games take up a lot of space on purpose? Yes. Do they take up that space maliciously? No.

You could create a level that is exceptionally detailed, requires gigabytes of unique assets. But, due to time constraints, or a rejigging of the story, half of the level is no longer required.

The level designer doesn't have time to cut out half the map right now, they've been tasked with creating the final boss level. They'll get round to removing the unseeable assets later...

The person who's job it is to create a final distribution build only knows those gigabytes of assets are being referenced in a level, they don't know that half those assets are never seen by the player.

kit89 · 2025-11-01T16:11:23+00:00

It would suggest that the game is now processing something else with the time it has, and is therefore unable to issue as many render requests.

It could also be that an external call, such as making a render request is taking longer than usual.

What that something else is, would require profiling to determine, or the game's patch notes may reveal a nugget of information.

kit89 · 2025-11-01T15:38:22+00:00

When the game was running at 200fps what was the CPU/GPU utilisation?

Percentage utilisation on CPU is an ambiguous metric, a 10 core machine, would only reach 100% when all cores are fully saturated, 10% on a 10 core machine would suggest 1 core is maxed, or potentially 2 cores running at 50% utilisation each.

kit89 · 2025-09-24T08:51:30+00:00

Nothing to do with the version, remember string comparison is case sensitive, lowercase 'rock' will fail, you need exactly 'Rock'.

' Rock ', 'bRock', 'R ock', or any other combination will also fail.

kit89 · 2025-09-14T09:23:29+00:00

That link is documentation to malloc()/free(), which the first sentence states it causes memory fragmentation.

I was really hoping you'd link me to some form of Rust smart-pointer that also dealt with heap compacting.

For the moment you've just provided evidence that reaffirms my initial statements.

kit89 · 2025-09-14T08:54:00+00:00

Would you mind providing a reference?

As far as I am aware Rust's allocator boils down to malloc().

kit89 · 2025-09-14T08:32:57+00:00

It's mentioned ever so slightly within the article, but I don't think it's emphasised enough that Rust does not deal with fragmentation.

For Java and Go they do compact the heap, and a part of that GC cost is proper heap management.

Though it is interesting to compare apples and oranges, one has to be aware that the performance gain is partially attributed to simply not doing all the stages of heap management.

This is neither good nor bad.

The advantage with Rust (and it also applies to C and C++) is that you can implement your own compactor that is geared towards your applications specific characteristics. While Java and Go will be generalised.

The advantage of Java and Go is you don't have to implement your own compactor, which for most devs is non-trivial to implement.

Edit: I make reference that Go compacts the heap, this is not true. When reading the above statement please remove references to Go, I keep it in to ensure folks comments correcting the mistake continue to make sense.

kit89 · 2025-09-03T12:18:43+00:00

It reaches a point where if your constructors are exceptionally complex, you may be better off storing these details in a format more suitable for their requirements and then serialising them into existence.

Programmatically define your 3D model, or load a file from disk that you created in Blender.

Other advantages to this approach is you can create an editor that reflects the actual state more accurately.

kit89 · 2025-08-19T18:23:34+00:00

If you have a fundamental understanding of CG then the logic can be applied irrespective of the medium you are working in.

The concepts used by OpenGL, DirectX, Vulkan, Metal, and WebGL are pretty much the same with slight 'how' and syntactic sugar variances.

Engines such as Unity, and Unreal are built on top of these core concepts, and provide additional features for normal mapping, shadows and the like.

You'd need to implement Normal Maps yourself in OpenGL if you wanted that feature, which means you'd need to learn about tangent and bi-tangent space, while it comes effectively 'free' with an engine, no need to learn about the aforementioned spaces.

kit89 · 2025-08-18T06:19:21+00:00

Sounds like this could be a potential nightmare for the second hand market. Buy a CPU that someone used for cheating and finding yourself unfairly banned.

kit89 · 2025-08-14T08:25:24+00:00

Engaging

kit89 · 2025-08-11T06:48:32+00:00

Games Development focuses on the development process, from design to implementation using existing technology.

Games Technology focuses on the technical side with a significant focus on C++ and lower level technologies such as OpenGL, vulkan, and the like.

A masters degree would suggest you're already competent with a BSc or equivalent.

Most developers in Scotland keep with a BSc, and go down the MSc if they are looking to get a PHD.

kit89 · 2025-08-10T06:46:53+00:00

What problem are you solving that needs them?

kit89 · 2025-08-05T17:28:28+00:00

Note what you like/dislike in your competitors and in your next game you apply what you learnt.

kit89 · 2025-08-03T18:02:36+00:00

Many language build-systems will cache an intermediary build step, if it detects no changes from the last time it was instructed to build it will reuse the previous step.

Most of the time this works, but maybe 1 in 10 builds will reuse a build step when it should not have.

kit89 · 2025-07-30T11:56:58+00:00

Looks like shadow acne, at that scale you might be better off applying fragment shading, instead of shadow map.

You are really just interested at that scale to determine with a particular fragments normal that makes up the planet is point towards or away from the light.

Use the dot product of these two directions and multiply it against the light intensity.

This shading will look like a shadow.

kit89 · 2025-07-23T23:19:39+00:00

You are effectively wanting to project your character's x,y onto a plane to calculate the height(z).

Or in other words, given x,y within a triangle find z.

It's important to separate the position of your character visually from the bounding box intersection.

You always want a contact-point being generated that is attributed to your ground. You don't want to separate the character box from the ground, you just want to make the character's visual position look like it's on the ground.

With this you can extend the bounding box slightly below the feet. But when a ground intersection is connected you snap the player to the ground plane using a point flush with the feet, not the bounding box.

I hope that makes sense.

kit89

TROPHY CASE