I've been playing around adding different culling techniques like frustum, distance, layer masks, small feature culling, lod tiers, antiportal volumes, a pvs bake for cell/portal visibility, and software rasterized occlusion culling. Shadows also now get their own caster gather across three cascades.
I've been playing around with porting my game engine's user interface over from imgui to noesisgui. Its WYSIWYG editor gives me a workflow similar to Figma and looks much better.
I've also added a curves module to my engine and an in memory data logger, which enable trending data in the UI.
The goal of this data logger is to start pumping entity component system data into a keyframe like viewer to allow playback of gameplay recordings eventually.
Then I can record some gameplay, play it back, while stepping through and inspecting the data. Would be pretty neat!
The user experience with noesisgui is actually reallly good!
Here's some progress on my third iteration, or take, or attempt at a game engine.
Each time, I get some of the way through the previous engine and learn so much that I can't help but start over and apply the lessons. Each one gets better than the last.
It doesn't look like much yet, but I went with c language this time and I've got lua scripting, gltf parsing, pbr shaders, some lighting, and noesis gui integration working.
I'm finding I really enjoy setting up gltf compatible scenes w/models, exporting them as glb, then loading them into the engine.
I can define everything in Blender and run it in the engine. With this workflow, I’m finding I need an engine editor layer less and less.
AI use disclaimer: yes, I use AI. No, I don't vibe code.
Playing around with noesis gui runtime and studio.
I've been able to create user interfaces in studio, wrote a C wrapper for the C++ library, integrated the runtime and rendering with my sokol/opengl setup, and wired up events to my lua scripting layer so I can register callbacks for UI events.
Overall impression: I'm really liking it. It's giving me a workflow similar to figma.
There's an entire layer of the internet hiding in plain sight.
Older than browsers. Text only. No ads, no tracking, no algorithm. Just menus, files, and the occasional very weird stranger leaving notes for whoever wanders by.
It's called Gopher. I built a silly little web app for wandering around in it. Come waste an afternoon.