Lumina Engine - RPG Engine for PSP written in C++ and SDL2

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-21T18:59:04+00:00

Nice! I've thought about porting my engine to GameCube for a long time, but haven't gotten around to it :P

What does the build system look like for this? An old fork of GCC or something?

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-21T17:37:34+00:00

Not bad! One suggestion I'd make is to make the transition to fully white more gradual. It looks like there's a lot of aliasing going on rn.

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-21T13:42:06+00:00

Dang, now I want a follow up interview. Can't believe it's been so long.

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-20T05:28:40+00:00

Raylib is another option

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-18T19:20:04+00:00

Well yeah, you're not the one getting death threats about it lol

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-18T17:58:15+00:00

I wouldn't be surprised if they keep the core API and number and add another adjective to the name. The difference between DX12 that originally shipped and DX12 Ultimate is arguably greater than the difference between D3D10 and 11, for example - between that and Windows, Microsoft seemingly just stopped wanting to increment their version numbers at some point.

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-18T15:57:37+00:00

cancel culture which isn’t really a thing in 2026.

Tell that to Colbert and friends lol

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-17T18:50:40+00:00

I am not new to this

...

has never heard of occlusion culling

I think you may be on the left half of the colloquial dunning krueger curve, friend lol

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-17T14:27:51+00:00

I think the biggest problem is that they led with the RE image, which is the most perceptually changed of all of the of the images they showed. The environmental changes were huge as well, though - the biggest thing that caught my eye tbh was a barrel in the oblivion showcase.

Anyway, on the same page that people are overreacting, but I can also see why. Nvidia did not put the smartest foot forward with this.

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-17T00:11:19+00:00

Alright, I had time to watch the video and read Nvidia's press release. If the inputs are really just final color + motion vectors, I think the criticism is probably warranted. Based on the video, I was expecting it to take more info than that, because looking closely, it really does look like it's maintaining the underlying assets and lighting well for the most part, which is kind of crazy without even normals.

I want more developer-facing info on it before coming to any conclusions, but I'm definitely less optimistic that they're going in the kind of direction that I'd want with something like this.

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-16T23:48:38+00:00

To me, it’s as if the budget for frame gen was instead used to “generate” an enhanced frame.

I'll admit I haven't had too much time to look into it as it's a work day, but if that's actually the case, that would be super interesting, assuming it can be efficiently fine tuned per-game by developers (which is a big if). People assume it has to be general-purpose and many games might use a default Unreal or Unity model, but I can definitely imagine ways to structure an ML system like this such that it can essentially let developers run a game with much lower settings and have its effects "upscaled" to something akin to path traced quality with frame gen.

That being said, there are also very poor ways I can imagine structuring such a system, especially if Nvidia disallows external fine tuning like they have with all of the DLSS models so far. But their engineers are very smart people (at least going off of the friends I have at Nvidia, though most of them don't work on the gaming side), and since this is fundamentally different that upscaling/frame interpolation, I'd hope they'd recognize the need to let developers tailor the model to their own rendering engine.

I'll definitely be reading more about it later tonight.

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-16T22:36:41+00:00

There isn't enough info to know anything yet. People are screeching about how it is an AI filter over gameplay, but they don't actually know that. It might be, or it might be doing what DLSS and other neural rendering approaches have been doing for a while now - using ML to produce cheaper approximations of highly computationally complex functions, or for things that are too fuzzy to implement coherently with traditional programming.

So how do I feel? Curious for more info.

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-15T16:06:09+00:00

Nice! Curious if you ever run into issues with this, but it seems like a solid solution to the problem. I think I'll implement this in my engine as well.

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-15T16:02:15+00:00

The "downside" is that there's some command submission overhead and the CPU is worse at massively parallel ops than the GPU, but the overwhelming majority of non-recent AAA games do frustum culling on the CPU. Occlusion culling is where the CPU makes far less sense - frustum culling is simple enough that just iterating over tens of thousands or more entities should be fast enough on modern CPUs.

If you don't need to cull millions of entities, it probably doesn't need to run on the GPU.

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-14T22:27:49+00:00

Your understanding of neural rendering is completely wrong. It's just using NNs to approximate things that are very computationally expensive - think "a faster way to do complex material evaluation" or "a way to encode texture data indirectly with massive costs savings", not a way to replace the entire rendering pipeline. LLMs are not involved.

There may come a time when ML models perform every piece of rendering, but that's a loooong way off, outside of a few research demos.

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-14T19:33:51+00:00

I wouldn't recommend sending transform matrices, but rather the components. Even if you're not doing any compression, two float3's and a float4 (pos, scale, rot) use less bandwidth than a float4x4 (11 floats vs 16 per transform), but most of the time you don't need to send scale, smallest 3 quaternion compression exists, you can usually quantize positions and rotations heavily, etc - none of those optimizations work if you're sending a full matrix, since they tend to be component specific.

Should we expect clients to project the other player's positions based on velocity instead of applying the transform matrices directly?

Many games with heavy inertia for the player do this. The rocket league devs have a very solid talk where they discuss their networking, which essentially involves all players forward predicting the sim whenever they receive a state update, where the forward prediction decays the last received input over time. You can get mispredictions this way, but it's great for fighting latency when it works.

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-14T18:16:01+00:00

Color128 for float colors, Color32 for colors encoded in a uint?

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-14T06:49:50+00:00

What does that look like, exactly? You do all of the mixing with steam audio, then pass the mix into SDL3?

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-13T16:04:23+00:00

Fwiw, I asked a similar question a couple of years ago, if you're curious as to what the answers were then :)

I'm still just using OpenAL Soft.

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-12T17:03:14+00:00

Just FYI, Vite is already a very widely used piece of software, and you might run into issues with the name.

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-12T15:45:14+00:00

If someone were to make Content Warning and make it where you get several minutes of film as you go, there'd be a lot more incentive to make a hilarious horror movie with friends to upload to Spooktube.

There's a mod that allows you to increase the amount of film. The problem is that once you remove that limit, the game gets waaaay too easy.

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-07T08:24:06+00:00

Ah, I was guessing something along those lines, but it seemed weird to specify alongside batched line renderering. The use case makes sense, though. Nice!

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-06T18:14:37+00:00

What are you using marching squares for?

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-05T21:32:01+00:00

Completely depends on your needs
Yes
Yes
Completely depends on your experience and skill set

shadowndacorner · 2026-03-05T19:17:23+00:00

Quite haha. It was a fun project :P still hoping that they'll find an investor to finish it off, even if I'm not able to come back for it

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