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CUSTOM GAME ENGINES: A Small Study

WARNING: Article moved to separate repo to allow users contributions: https://github.com/raysan5/custom_game_engines

A couple of weeks ago I played (and finished) A Plague Tale, a game by Asobo Studio. I was really captivated by the game, not only by the beautiful graphics but also by the story and the locations in the game. I decided to investigate a bit about the game tech and I was surprised to see it was developed with a custom engine by a relatively small studio. I know there are some companies using custom engines but it's very difficult to find a detailed market study with that kind of information curated and updated. So this article.

Nowadays lots of companies choose engines like [Unreal](https:

Volumetric Clouds Resources List

A. Schneider, "Real-Time Volumetric Cloudscapes," in GPU Pro 7: Advanced Rendering Techniques, 2016, pp. 97-127. (Follow up presentations here, and here.)
S. Hillaire, "Physically Based Sky, Atmosphere and Cloud Rendering in Frostbite" in Physically Based Shading in Theory and Practice course, SIGGRAPH 2016. [video] [course notes] [scatter integral shadertoy]
[R. Högfeldt, "Convincing Cloud Rendering – An Implementation of Real-Time Dynamic Volumetric Clouds in Frostbite"](https://odr.chalmers.se/hand

GPU Optimization for GameDev

Graphics Pipeline / GPU Architecture Overview

2011 - A trip through the Graphics Pipeline 2011
2013 - Performance Optimization Guidelines and the GPU Architecture behind them
2015 - Life of a triangle - NVIDIA's logical pipeline
2015 - Render Hell 2.0
2016 - How bad are small triangles on GPU and why?
2017 - GPU Performance for Game Artists
2019 - Understanding the anatomy of GPUs using Pokémon

How to use nginx as a reverse-proxy with letsencrypt

Your infrastructure

generated via plantuml

Requirements

What is the Strict Aliasing Rule and Why do we care?

(OR Type Punning, Undefined Behavior and Alignment, Oh My!)

What is strict aliasing? First we will describe what is aliasing and then we can learn what being strict about it means.

In C and C++ aliasing has to do with what expression types we are allowed to access stored values through. In both C and C++ the standard specifies which expression types are allowed to alias which types. The compiler and optimizer are allowed to assume we follow the aliasing rules strictly, hence the term strict aliasing rule. If we attempt to access a value using a type not allowed it is classified as undefined behavior(UB). Once we have undefined behavior all bets are off, the results of our program are no longer reliable.

Unfortunately with strict aliasing violations, we will often obtain the results we expect, leaving the possibility the a future version of a compiler with a new optimization will break code we th

Effective Modern CMake

Getting Started

For a brief user-level introduction to CMake, watch C++ Weekly, Episode 78, Intro to CMake by Jason Turner. LLVM’s CMake Primer provides a good high-level introduction to the CMake syntax. Go read it now.

After that, watch Mathieu Ropert’s CppCon 2017 talk Using Modern CMake Patterns to Enforce a Good Modular Design (slides). It provides a thorough explanation of what modern CMake is and why it is so much better than “old school” CMake. The modular design ideas in this talk are based on the book [Large-Scale C++ Software Design](https://www.amazon.de/Large-Scale-Soft

	I was drawn to programming, science, technology and science fiction
	ever since I was a little kid. I can't say it's because I wanted to
	make the world a better place. Not really. I was simply drawn to it
	because I was drawn to it. Writing programs was fun. Figuring out how
	nature works was fascinating. Science fiction felt like a grand
	adventure.

	Then I started a software company and poured every ounce of energy
	into it. It failed. That hurt, but that part is ok. I made a lot of
	mistakes and learned from them. This experience made me much, much

	#version 450
	#extension GL_ARB_separate_shader_objects : enable
	#extension GL_KHR_shader_subgroup_basic : enable
	#extension GL_KHR_shader_subgroup_ballot : enable
	#extension GL_KHR_shader_subgroup_vote : enable
	#extension GL_KHR_shader_subgroup_arithmetic : enable

	layout(location = 0) out vec4 outColor;

	//#define VISUALIZE_WAVES

	// ### [ Lexical part ] ########################################################

	_ascii_letter_upper
	: 'A' - 'Z'
	;

	_ascii_letter_lower
	: 'a' - 'z'
	;

	local core = require "ecs.core"

	local ecs = {}

	local entities = {} -- all Entities, eid -> entity
	local entity_id = 0
	ecs.entities = entities

	-- cset: component set
	local cset = { __mode = "kv" }