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I just wrapped my C++ vector graphics engine in a Nitro Module and shipped it to npm.
react-native-nitro-vector — bezier curves, path analysis and SVG parsing, all running in C++ off the JS thread.
Built with Nitro Modules by @mrousavy
npmjs.com/package/react-nati…
Gideon retweeted
Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 461 - November 1st, 2026 jendrikillner.com/post/graph…
Gideon retweeted
Day 371 of making The King's Surveyor in my custom game engine: enemies 💀
Been exploring lots of new enemies and mechanics this week, they are progressing nicely!
Not above asking you to wishlist on steam if this looks cool to you!
Gideon retweeted
Meet Peekafold 💜
Built solo 🚀
Peekafold: pop-up books for 3–5 year olds, where every fold is a game. No ads, no tracking.
Sponsors welcome, and if you want an app this cute and cool built, my DMs are open 🙏
Open a book. Fold it shut. Watch the magic happen ✨
Peekafold is pop-up books for ages 3–5 on iPhone & iPad. Close the book: Foldy chomps his lunch, a butterfly prints its wings.
No ads. No reading needed. Plays offline.
Join the waitlist: peekafold.com/x/launch-trail…
Gideon retweeted
Here's part 3 of my video series on memory management. It has a fun and slightly cursed exercise of reimplementing the function call stack in user code, demonstrates frame allocators / arenas, and looks at a couple of freelist implementations.
youtu.be/VW_NUH-6kv0
Gideon retweeted
🎨 Announcing 𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚌𝚝-𝚗𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚎-𝚝𝚐𝚏𝚡: A new GPU graphics library for #reactnative, powered by Tencent's tgfx and Nitro!
Custom shaders, live camera effects, and animations that keep running when the JS thread is busy - rendered with Vulkan and Metal. 🧵
Gideon retweeted
Being part of the game and engine dev community, there’s an easy trap we all fall into early on:
Putting together a decent renderer, calling it a "game engine", and claiming it runs faster than this or that industry standard tech.
Sure, those mainstream engines are so bloated that hardly anyone enjoys using them anymore. We’ve all been there, and I believe that's why we do what we do. But the reality is that we can’t evaluate an engine's true performance without an actual game running on top of it (or at least part of it).
Early isolated test scenes (that damn Sponza...) do a decent job simulating GPU load, but they don't tell the whole story when it comes to real world game production where a bunch of systems come together.
Assuming that your renderer is indeed a capable one that meets certain standards, a complete game has to handle far more than that... Physics, audio, UI, localization, asset streaming, editor tools, complex gameplay logic, you name it... And all that compete for CPU and cache bandwidth.
Getting 500 FPS in an isolated test scene is great as an academic exercise, but it's the classic case of lab vs real-world data failure. So forget about test scenes and before you declare war on the giants, at the very least prove your tech can drive a small but real, modern game concept without falling apart.
To avoid any misunderstanding (given that I'm also building my own engine) I say this out of a genuine hope to see more decentralized, transformative gamedev tech again. Especially now, when the playing field appears to be somewhat equalizing for independent game devs.
Gideon retweeted
C++ templates and signals are being explored in game development for improved signal handling and type safety.
raynmetal.github.io/blog/tec…
#gamedev #indiedev #signal #gamedevelopment
Gideon retweeted
my article on global illumination, the final one for the year, is in the works
another excuse to make beautiful posters using the work that will be featured in it
ALT Poster featuring the outline of my upcoming article on Global Illumination Background shows white arches against a blue sky, with natural shadows, bounced lights, soft lighting Title: Lighting That Feels Just Right Topics: Lighting model Screen-Space Global Illumination Raymarching Temporal Accumulation Probe-based Global Illumination Hysteresis Reflections Sky Light
ALT Poster featuring the outline of my upcoming article on Global Illumination Background shows a corner of a room with an orange and green sphere and blue box against the wall, lit through by the sun coming through the window, with light bouncing in the corners and colors bleeding on the ground Title: Lighting That Feels Just Right Topics: Lighting model Screen-Space Global Illumination Raymarching Temporal Accumulation Probe-based Global Illumination Hysteresis Reflections Sky Light
ALT Poster featuring the outline of my upcoming article on Global Illumination Background shows the entrance to a dark, gloomy corridor viewed from the side, with glowing neon lights. Title: Lighting That Feels Just Right Topics: Lighting model Screen-Space Global Illumination Raymarching Temporal Accumulation Probe-based Global Illumination Hysteresis Reflections Sky Light
Gideon retweeted
Unreal Engine X, upcoming update.
A Visibility Buffer pipeline in the style of Guerrilla’s Deferred Texturing 🌴
Following Guerrilla’s “Adventures with Deferred Texturing in Horizon Forbidden West” (GDC 2022), dense foliage is rasterised into a visibility buffer. Its materials are then classified, binned and shaded on async compute, beside BasePass and shadow depths. Deferred lights wait just 0.03 ms for it.
Two more changes keep that async window working:
Artist-friendly Volumetric Light replaces Epic’s fog and light shafts but why?
• Epic’s Volumetric Fog was soft and blurry, Light Shafts were a separate screen-space effect, and both ran on the graphics queue.
• I wanted crisp shafts from the sun, spot lights and point lights, controls I can use directly, and a design built to run beside the Visibility Buffer.
How:
• Prepare, shadow min/max and integration run on async compute beside deferred lighting, which doesn’t slow down (1.35 vs 1.34 ms).
• The only graphics-queue cost is a 0.13 ms composite.
🌿 Foliage shadow caching
Why:
• Unreal redraws wind-animated foliage (World Position Offset) into every shadow cascade every frame.
• That heavy shadow raster competed with the async material resolve.
How:
• Foliage now goes into the cached static shadow maps.
• Cascade 0 drops from 0.45 to 0.07 ms and cascade 1 from 0.69 to 0.07 ms.
• All shadow depths drop from 1.72 to about 0.75 ms, roughly 1 ms saved.
📊 Same trace, RTX 3060 @ 1080p, median GPU frame:
• Legacy renderer + Epic fog: 8.91 ms
• Visibility Buffer + Epic fog: 8.82 ms
• Visibility Buffer + Volumetric Light: 8.16 ms
➡️ -0.75 ms against legacy, of which -0.66 ms comes from removing Epic fog and light shafts
⚡ Current frame with everything on: 7.46 ms, with about 4.3 ms of async compute overlapping each frame.
References
• Far cascades redraw moving objects every Nth frame, after MachineGames’ Indiana Jones (REAC 2025) and Treyarch’s Cold War (GDC 2021)
• Post processing overlapping the next frame, as in id Software’s DOOM: The Dark Ages same idea is supported by advancements in Ubisoft engine.
#UnrealEngine #UE5 #gamedev #rendering #realtimerendering
Gideon retweeted
New blog post: Building a Fiber-Based Job System from Scratch.
I walk through how I built the fiber-based job system in my offline renderer, including scheduling, synchronization, and the design choices behind it.
agraphicsguynotes.com/posts/…
Gideon retweeted
Shadow Caster Volume Culling 🔦
gamedev.net/tutorials/progra…
Gideon retweeted
Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 460 - October 25th, 2026 jendrikillner.com/post/graph…
Gideon retweeted
Modern Scene Rendering, Buffers, Images, Samplers, Shaders, Bindless, MDI, and BDA in Vulkan: A Development Overview
youtube.com/watch?v=G5EECLl0…
#sam #vulkan #indiedev #gamedevelopment #gamedev #rendering
Gideon retweeted
Spherical Harmonics Optimization Explained: An Insightful Approach
andrew-helmer.github.io/demy…
#gamedev #gamedevelopment #indiedev
