from Hacker News

Frickin' shaders with frickin' laser beams

by clebio on 12/12/21, 6:24 PM with 26 comments

• by wodenokoto on 12/12/21, 9:58 PM

  While I hate tons of javascript as much as the next HN'er, do yourself a favor and scroll _up_, enjoy the view and press play. So awesome!

• by junon on 12/12/21, 9:12 PM

  The screenshots are from one of my favorite games called The Talos Principle. Curious, is the author of the site associated with it? That game is custom built, looks incredible even on cheaper hardware (e.g. it looked beautiful on my 2015 MBP when I first played it). Crazy stuff.

• by vanderZwan on 12/12/21, 11:26 PM

  > The key thing is that I don't intend to make thousands of draw calls this way either. I just want to make a couple dozen of exactly the draw calls I need, preferably today, not next week. It's a radically different use case from what game engines need, which is what the current industry APIs are really mostly tailored for.

  Whenever I try to learn WebGL (or similar technology) I give up after a while. In my head I imagine it as if the entire automotive industry was only aimed at F1 race cars, and people who want to do practical day-to-day things with cars only had F1 tech to work with, including the cost and complexity.

• by davedx on 12/13/21, 12:14 PM

  Can't believe this doesn't have more upvotes, seems like it could be a pretty groundbreaking project to advance the state of the art of GPU programming.

  Having done a decent amount of games development, and a little bit of shader coding, the pain points fixed by the approach in the article are significant. Really impressive stuff.

  I didn't even realize it was going to be TypeScript until much later in the article too, that was the cherry on top :)

• by inDigiNeous on 12/13/21, 6:50 AM

  Enjoyed looking at the code, might want to try this system out when WebGPU starts to be more relevant. The importing of .glsl symbols somehow into typescript would be perfect for playing around with effects.

  Many times it would be better to have a simple way to express ideas, not having to deal with the most performant systems, which might take a lot more figuring out or issues with debugging your shaders.

• by onion2k on 12/12/21, 10:09 PM

  The idea of writing shaders in something akin to Typescript sounds a bit like a dream.

• by perceptive on 12/13/21, 7:39 AM

  In case you are reading this on mobile and have no clue where to find the amazing animations in action: watch the site in desktop mode and scroll up.

• by aappleby on 12/13/21, 1:51 AM

  "In my case, I want to construct and call any shader I want at run-time. Arbitrary composition is the entire point. This implies that when I want to go make a GPU call, I need to generate and link a new program, based on the specific types and access patterns of values being passed in."

  For toy apps, sure. For professional apps or games, abso-frickin-lutely not. Shader compilation jank is still an annoying issue in even recent games, and even having the ability_ to define arbitrary shaders at any point is such a huge footgun that I'd never let it past code review.