While writing Blaze, and heavily referring Sascha Willem’s Vulkan Samples, I came across the part of writing to cubemaps (PBR-IBL calculations, Shadow Mapping etc) Sascha used a 2D framebuffer attachment to render to, and then copy to a face of the cubemap. But, back when I used learnopengl.com Joey de Vries used Geometry shader for Omni-directional Shadow Mapping. So I ended up researching alternatives - since I’ve read Geometry shaders are nasty business (they are slower in quite a few cases) and the one face at a time felt boring.

Over the week, my latest obsession has been to implement a GPU based ray tracer. Initially, I did read up on using fragment shaders, but it has its limits. So before I even started, I switched over to using compute shaders. For anyone who is intent on implementing their own should probably give Peter Shirley’s book good read. I have closely followed it for my project and I’m just going to write about parts that cover the problems I faced when porting the logic to the compute shaders.

Alright, this is what’s new in my life. I’ve found my area of passion in games, and exactly in rendering in games. I’m learning OpenGL, and it’s insane what it can let me do. (I’m not good enough yet, but with practice, THERE IS SO MUCH TO LEARN – AAAAAH) So, I started with learnopengl.com and started making a trial monolithic C++ main file. There’s one thing watching a demo using Sponza, and there’s one where you’re watching your own code rendering it.

Introduction Open Source Software is probably the greatest testament to Programmer culture, or at least, it is in my opinion. You have a purely voluntary work experience on projects that you can’t build alone - while simultaneously contributing to something that more than you and your friends use. The feeling of your contribution to the world is a sweet feeling. If you want to know more about open source this should help

Beginning I was interested in game development since 9th grade, which was my main motivation for learning C++. As I got more into development, I started getting interested in game engines and tried creating my own using Allegro for rendering amd resource handling. Inferno, if you’re interested. Finally I got my hands on the Quake 2 engine source code (Thanks id-Software) and started reading the source, and that’s when I came across Godot.