Water caustics improvements: - Added a "focal depth" with max "sharpness", caustics get smoother away from the focal depth - Voronoi octaves added+multiplied (n1+n2+n1*n2) to make overlaps extra bright - Slight chromatic dispersion, amplified at focal depth

Sped up voxel world saving by >1000x Octree data is stored in a pool allocator (the save is just the whole allocator dumped to a file ~256MB) Pool indices that change during gameplay are marked dirty -> then written directly to the file during save save -> write dirty pools to separate buffer on the main thread -> write buffer to a file on a worker thread in the background Just a very quick copy in RAM then the slow file IO happens asynchronously

Added a nice hexagonal build effect Also tuned up the grass + environment Polishing

I like to add intricate mechanisms & pipes

Agentic gnomes can now be used to automate crafting and machine fueling You provide them with a queue of items to craft, and the "scheduler" creates tasks for dependent items etc. Extract resources -> manufacture -> exchange items for new technology

A simple atmospheric scattering color gradient make fog look much better

Getting 120 fps after multi-threading my render system 3 stage pipeline: simulates game state, fills + optimizes GPU command buffer and submits commands simultaneously Now getting 100-120 fps on my gaming laptop and 60 on my macbook!

Be careful using std::cout on multiple threads (esp. on Windows) Lock contention in std::cout was causing several millisecond delays in my engine's sim thread Best bet is to write your own logger so you can control how it handles shared resources etc.

Added wavelength dependent scattering (Mie/Rayleigh) Fog color changes based on view angle relative to sun direction

Just made my render loop multi-threaded (super stable framerate): Rendering runs while the next frame is being simulated (lua + physics etc.) Rendering + sim are synced once per frame -> copy all relevant sim data to a "packet" which is handed off to render Any GPU ops on the sim thread are pushed to a command buffer that is passed off to the render thread which executes the accumulated GPU commands before rendering Frame rate is perfectly stable even with a ton of NPCs/script runners

Blender pipe generator made with geometry nodes All maps to 1 texture

More assets: Each of these has ~200 polygons Trying to save time by making a really simple mesh then adding all the details to the textures in substance painter

Underrated “optimization”: Making sure that your GPU is actually running 100% of the time (no stalls waiting for the CPU/memory contention etc)

Order independent hash functions: Useful for mesh operations where you want to index/search for a triangle "facet" via its 3 vertex indices and you don't care about the ordering of the indices

1. Test play game from the start 2. Write down every bug/issue I encounter 3. Fix issues 4. Repeat Been running this loop lately

Made my A* implementation 4x faster by removing all dynamic allocations Uses fixed sized heaps + static arrays allocated at startup Makes pipe routing much smoother

2-4x faster frustum culling: Wrote this SIMD implementation of the view-frustum + bounding box intersection test Parallelizes across 8 bbox corners (2x4) to maximize lane usage This function is heavily used in the rendering loop

Added VIM to my developer console I now officially have a game engine editor All text is rendered by the engine w/ custom code Allows you to write lua code and run it (like spawning enemies etc)

Water voxel remeshing and liquid simulation are now running on a separate thread. Liquid sim now has ~0 effect on the frame rate / stuttering