Shader PSA - be very careful passing float Inf default values into shaders now that the modern APIs support Inf and NaN in shader code.

Graphics compilers can reassociate order of computation, and we often end up with "0 * Inf" after reassociation resulting in a NaN which is sticky and causes a downstream mess for the rest of the shader.

Default allowing Inf and NaNs in graphics shaders was a mistake IMO. Old-school FTZ for NaN and clamp to min/max value for Inf was a lot more stable.

New blog post: Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles (2007)

And it's done. I'm pretty sure this is the post that I put the most work into. So many pictures, so much text, so many games (3!).

It's also one of the longest pieces I've published on my blog. Apparently I had more to say about DXC than about my homelab or even that one October leading up to Halloween where I watched the entire Friday the 13th, Scream and Halloween franchises and wrote a bit about all movies. 🤯

That's a lot of words.

You've been warned! 😬

The demoscene event @demoparty_no Black Valley was this weekend. I entered music in newschool music and in the black metal competitions. I came in at first place in the black metal competition and in 12th place in newschool music. In the newschool compo I sort of went back to how I used to make music. Had lots of joy making it. This is the track No Light, No End from the newschool compo. #demoscene #ambient

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q66crenMkXM

GDC 2013: "Advanced Visual Effects with DirectX 11: The Rendering Technologies of Crysis 3" by Tiago Sousa of Crytek https://gdcvault.com/play/1017626/Advanced-Visual-Effects-with-DirectX

Oh boy, a Tiago Sousa presentation! And he doesn't disappoint 😁

He covered a bunch of different topics:

1. Optimizations to their G-buffer. Previously, they had a bunch of content that couldn't be rendered into the G-buffer because it uses some special material properties.

1/5

Someone made an interactive series of challenges/exercises to learn graphics programming. It's very polished.

https://shaderacademy.com/

I don’t think you can talk about graphics rendering without sounding like a witch/wizard

The moment you say “texture coordinate”, “matrix transformation”, “screen space”, “vertex shader” or “quaternion” (if you’re into that kinda thing), it’s all over. Put the pointy hat on.

"Let's Learn x86-64 Assembly!" by @nicebyte

This is a really good absolute basics intro to x64 assembly, and includes a bunch of stuff I certainly didn't know.

https://gpfault.net/posts/asm-tut-0.txt.html