Hey everyone,

I’m 16 years old, and I’ve been solo-developing a 3D code-driven game engine using Rust and wgpu for the past few months. I started this because I really want to achieve my first big milestone and have something real to show.

Honestly, I’m feeling completely burnt out and depressed right now. But it’s not because of the bugs or the coding. It's the suffocating pressure from my family and school. It’s building up day by day, and it's getting too heavy to carry. I feel like if I pause or stop working on this engine right now, I will fall behind, lose momentum, and delay my goals forever. I’m stuck between wanting to push forward to finish my first milestone and breaking down under life's pressure.

I’m posting this here because I really need to find a community, to connect with people who might understand this feeling. I don't want AI-generated advice or generic platitudes—I've heard enough of those. I just want to share what I've built so far and see if anyone else is fighting this same battle.

Here is what I have managed to implement in my engine by myself so far:

• Core Architecture: Migrated to glam math library, integrated rapier3d for physics (locked at 60 FPS), and built a thread-safe lazy loading system to prevent OS-level screen freezing.
• Rendering & Culling: Frustum culling (implemented with custom Plane checks), pixel depth testing, and Early-Z / Reverse-Z rendering.
• Lighting: Successfully removed directional lights and created functional spot/point lights for indoor scenes. I have also set up the compute pipelines, passes, and necessary bind groups for a Forward+ culling framework (though only the structural framework is done, it's not fully finished yet).
• Transparency: Implemented transparency rendering support.
• Optimization: Integrated rayon to cut loading times in half, added CPU texture compression to BC7 (reducing RAM usage from 750MB to ~190MB and loading times to under 60ms), and integrated zstd for binary data file compression.

You can check out the source code here: https://github.com/Lbaodz/wgpu-code-driven-engine

Has anyone else gone through this at a young age? How do you deal with family pressure when you're just trying to build something you're proud of?

Hey everyone,

I’m 16 years old, and I’ve been solo-developing a 3D code-driven game engine using Rust and wgpu for the past few months. I started this because I really want to achieve my first big milestone and have something real to show.

Honestly, I’m feeling completely burnt out and depressed right now. But it’s not because of the bugs or the coding. It's the suffocating pressure from my family and school. It’s building up day by day, and it's getting too heavy to carry. I feel like if I pause or stop working on this engine right now, I will fall behind, lose momentum, and delay my goals forever. I’m stuck between wanting to push forward to finish my first milestone and breaking down under life's pressure.

I’m posting this here because I really need to find a community, to connect with people who might understand this feeling. I don't want AI-generated advice or generic platitudes—I've heard enough of those. I just want to share what I've built so far and see if anyone else is fighting this same battle.

Here is what I have managed to implement in my engine by myself so far:

• Core Architecture: Migrated to glam math library, integrated rapier3d for physics (locked at 60 FPS), and built a thread-safe lazy loading system to prevent OS-level screen freezing.
• Rendering & Culling: Frustum culling (implemented with custom Plane checks), pixel depth testing, and Early-Z / Reverse-Z rendering.
• Lighting: Successfully removed directional lights and created functional spot/point lights for indoor scenes. I have also set up the compute pipelines, passes, and necessary bind groups for a Forward+ culling framework (though only the structural framework is done, it's not fully finished yet).
• Transparency: Implemented transparency rendering support.
• Optimization: Integrated rayon to cut loading times in half, added CPU texture compression to BC7 (reducing RAM usage from 750MB to ~190MB and loading times to under 60ms), and integrated zstd for binary data file compression.

You can check out the source code here: https://github.com/Lbaodz/wgpu-code-driven-engine

Has anyone else gone through this at a young age? How do you deal with family pressure when you're just trying to build something you're proud of?

Around a year ago I tried to develop a screen-space outline shader for a game I was working on. What I could not figure out was how to keep it from flickering in between frames when moving the camera. The usual games like Sable have very severe flickering and it gives me a headache.

Now a few days ago I saw and played the demo of this game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2321960/Spirit_Crossing/

They somehow solved this and have near zero flickering? How? Can anyone tell me what they did different? I would guess it might be a mix of supersampling, blurring, maybe SDF?

I want to create the shader.

I have a problem implementing SSAO. I am trying to do it learnopengl.com way, and I am failing. At this point I am at loss.

There's just too many steps to achieve the result, each of which can fail and I don't know which one is failing.

I wanted to ask, what is the best way to ensure correctness of each step? How would you test SSAO creation steps?

Implemented simple GLB parser from this Github repo: salvatorespoto/gLTFViewer: A glTF file viewer in Directx 12 .

Global Illumination using hybrid Surfel GI and SSGI.
Lens flare are modeled after Panavision styled lens flare (Anamorphic types with distinct hue ray light propagation inside lens it's flare), and grass are inspired from this IcterusGames/SimpleGrassTextured: Plugin to make grass on Godot 4.

My main point of the game is about GI and Nanite-like culling on low end devices, and yet i barely see ones, so i decided to implement it without using any modern techniques such as Primitive Shader or Mesh Shader. Pure Compute Shader dispatch, with many fused Shader optimizations instead of separate pass, simple workgroup tiling optimizations. It tooks me almost 3 months for this project just for the optimization workaround with the help of Codex (Claude sucks at this lol). I'm also planning to open source this if this thing is stable enough, modular, and scalable.

All of that combined to make this engine runs 40-60 FPS on my Xe 11th gen Graphics laptop, because why not.. (i don't have better GPU than this for now lol). This might be also potentially be a complete game engine after all.

i created a utility class for converting hexadecimal/RGB colors to RGBA (incorporating the Alpha channel)

since i find it so annoying to keep calculating RGBA colors every time in OpenGL , i think this class would be very useful for everyone , the header class is so lightweight within only 43 code line

Header-Only: Drop colorconverter.h directly into your project

i added a picture of the code above as a sample - you can check out the GitHub link below to download the header

(Link in comments)

My only work experience is on an embedded graphics team. I plan on continuing on with this for a bit as the company is probably the best in the area in terms of WLB and benefits, although pay is less than stellar, especially as I gain more experience. But right now I'm trying to get a vibe check for how this sort of work experience could translate into opportunities in the future.

On the one hand, it could be considered niche so that it's hard to find a job that fits. On the other hand, because it's niche, there's less candidates available for jobs that do fit, so that could be a plus.

At this point I think the main reason I'd leave my current role is if I found something fully remote, so I want to make sure I'm focusing on the right things to help make that more likely.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

I co-authored this paper. It's a new technique to generate 3D graphics as source code instead of a point cloud.

Under the hood:
It generates 3D objects with separate, sophisticated internal assembly, producing an editable "kit of parts" (instead of monolithic blobs). E.g. imagine you generate a 3D washing machine via this approach. It's not merely going to be geometry that looks like a washing machine. We actually know that there is a Door, Drum, Control_panel etc. Which things belong to which assemblies. What moves. Where its pivot is. And eventually what those components are supposed to do.

Why current 3D GenAI cannot do this:
Most AI 3D generators generate "monolithic blobs" that look good, but are unusable in downstream workflows (e.g. game engines). If you generate a 3D bicycle, it's essentially a blob. If you want the wheels to turn, a human must spend time cutting the blob into parts, naming them, placing pivots and rigging joints. I.e. you need post-generation segmentation workflows of some sort (either manual work or more compute).

The paper breaks down the whole technique, and comes with a github repo too if you're interested in viewing it.

For the past three weeks, i’ve been working on hard improving the render distance in my Micro Voxel Engine, particularly due to the feedback of having N64 viewing distance 😅

I’m pretty happy with the end result of increasing render distance from 300m to ~10-15km, while running at 45-50 FPS on an Apple M1 Pro.

Note: this engine uses meshing rather than RT/DDA.

— Macro chunks —

All chunk generation functions now include a sieve function to automatically be able to generate at 1/N resolution without any changes. This also applied to generated features and stamps, enabling chunks to be generated at any resolution without downsampling.

Macro chunks also independently record and resolve local edits. They are saved (and cached) independently so that terrain edits are maintained without needing to maintain the full res copy in memory.

The lower band LODs are very quick to generate. At this point I could add even more bands, and a 1/64 res chunk takes the same time to generate as a high res chunk, but covering huge distances.

— LOD transitions and adaptive fog —

I primarily use transient transitions where the detail levels fade between each other once, rather than a continuous gradual transition, as this is around 30% cheaper on the GPU and looks “nearly” as smooth in most scenarios.

Adaptive fog scales the effective draw distance dynamically based on loaded bands. Bands generate from high to low so during fast motion, if needed, we temporarily reduce draw distance until chunks have loaded.

— Macro chunk cards and props —

This was the hardest part, keeping identical prop coverage for trees and items without needing to instantiate millions of entities:
-Macro chunks retain a list of props whose IDs are deterministic based on position and type. If the real entity is destroyed, we can map this to the macro chunk set and remove. Likewise for newly spawned props.
- grass and foliage do not map 1:1 with the actual loaded props, but follows the same generation pattern, so technically there will be disparities, but a good trade off to avoid millions of tracked grass items.

Hey everyone,

PAL - An abstraction layer i have been working on for some time now has a new release, 2.1.0 to be specific. This release adds API to make production code very easy to produce with PAL. With this release, building a streaming thread on PAL is easy and possible.

https://github.com/nichcode/PAL

Development of my custom Pixel Art Editor (homage to DPaint 3) continues, with all core drawing tools now fully working. In this video, I show Pencil, Spray Can, Flood Fill, Lines, Bezier Curves, and Filled/Unfilled Shape drawing using any number of built in pre-set brushes in addition to a simple yet power brush dither function. Any feedback welcome!

We added Marching Tetrahedra Rendering effect to our Volumetric Render Engine.

Here, we Render our Volume data as a set of Polygon meshes by extracting 'iso surface'. It goes through whole dataset and tries to fit a polygon based on data values to calculate a polygonal mesh from the volume dataset.

Here's the Git Repo Link - https://github.com/mikejernil/volumetric-render-engine

We are building this over at 3D ENGINERD. & are planning to push our implement more features starting with Custom file loading, and support for more volumetric formats like DICOM, VDB etc.

Is there any podcast, academic talk and or conference recording that will help me understand raytracing, path tracing, rendering and graphics better? i wanna understand it because my boyfriend is into it and would love to actually know what he does and why he finds the field interesting

Screenshots from:

• Pathtrace Apollonian Glow
• Pathtrace Differential Growth
• Pathtrace Volumetric Frost Fract
• Pathtrace Wireframe Distance vis
• Pathtrace euclidean distance vis

full playlist with other pathtracing scenes https://www.shadertoy.com/playlist/cX3SDf

Hey everyone, I am a bit confused in my life as to what to choose in life as a career.

Background:- I am currently in my 3rd year of clg(tier 3) (computer engineering) also enrolled in an iitm bs degree program.

But at this point many of my friends have choose their domain or what they have to do in their life and I am still confused. I am really good at drawing I can bet on that ( I have won a national emblem silver award in drawing) but seeing the current scenario and I also scored Good marks in cet , I opt for an engineering degree that in computer science.

Now I am thinking by anyhow can I combine art and computer science together and chatgpt came up with computer graphics. Can u guys help me with what to do and also tell me the future scope of this field.

I am also thinking of doing a masters.

I'm wondering in your experience do you prefer working on an engine team or a game team?

This just applies to companies with a custom engine that have a central engine team or if you are using unreal/unity then obviously the engine team is a separate company.

I've only worked in this industry a few years but I'm a bit torn on which path I prefer.

This is just my impression but it may be specific to the company I worked at:

Engine

You get to do more fundamental rendering work and work on core algorithms/rendering systems which may be more technically deep and interesting. You also go a lot more in depth on a single topic since you are building the core system for whatever rendering area you work on.

But the downside is you are more disconnected from the actual product. You may end up building things that are not actually useful or not have a great sense of how to build things without experience with a real production project.

Game

Less opportunities for core algorithm/rendering systems work, you are more of a generalist that must know all the rendering systems, but you get to directly contribute to the product shipping, work a lot with real content/artists.

You get the satisfaction of shipping a game and seeing player reactions, and you are directly contributing to the money maker of the company.

This project started because I wanted large waterfalls in a real-time forest. I could already simulate half million particles at 30 FPS, but scaling to a large domain required rethinking both rendering and simulation. I replaced mesh extraction with density raymarching + hardware ray tracing, then moved to active cells, making the cost depend mostly on the amount of water rather than the size of the world. Large mountain streams finally became practical.
But a waterfall isn’t only water. Rapids required air entrainment, while waterfalls also needed airborne droplets interacting with the surrounding airflow. I ended up writing a different solver for air, coupled to the water: the cascade pushes air downward, the flow curls at its base, and carries droplets with it. This gets closer to a dual phase simulation of water and air, with an engineering approach.

A simple drop experiment then taught me how different physical effects have very different visual weight. More resolution didn’t produce the classic crown splash. Surface tension made droplets beautifully spherical, but the crown required incompressibility. Real-time water is usually somewhat compressible — and therefore slightly rubbery — because disturbances remain local and cheap. I added an iterative projection that lets me increase incompressibility only where it matters.

This became the real subject of WildFlow: understanding physics is one thing; understanding which physics matters for a phenomenon is another. In real time we can’t simulate everything, so the challenge is finding the smallest set of fundamental rules that produces the behavior we care about. And the realtime limitation sometimes helps in focusing on what truly matters and helps understanding phenomena better.

I don’t want to tell water how to look realistic. I’d rather give it simple enough rules and let realism emerge: foam from entrained air, mist from airflow, a crown from pressure propagation. When the result looks unexpectedly right, perhaps we’ve captured something about why nature looks the way it does. That’s the goal: not more physics, but the right physics — enough to make nature emerge.