Maybe Vercidium will make sure that your TI-NSpire 84 calculator can finally play Sector's Edge in the future

"The Nspire 84 can't hurt you, it's not real" The nspire 84 :

Frick, as someone that got into embedded because of calculators, now I wanna port this to the Nspire

Aside from Nspire 84 not being a thing: I learned much of my initial programming knowledge on a TI-84 Plus Silver Edition, and I think that really taught me to value efficiency. Love seeing other people with similar stories!

I'm a sucker for coding stuff to run on ancient hardware because I started coding when I was a preteen in the 90s, when you had to know how to get the most out of a computer or your game ran like unplayable garbage. Nowadays devs just do whatever and ignore performance and optimization because they just let their end-user's hardware go to waste. EDIT: Indie devs, for the most part, is who I was referring to, but also companies like Bethesda that build layercakes of flashy FX ontop of their ancient engine.

I have a decent pc that can even run Cyberpunk 60fps. But for some unknown reason it freezes randomly even with no load. Like im experiencing 10 second freezes: on desktop; on lockscreen; opening explorer; randomly at any point. So even if the game can run at 10k fps on a calculator im still gonna have ~0.1fps

Jokes on you my shity laptop freezes when loading regular pngs

​@@cosy_sweatermight wanna have a look at your power supply, if it's defective it could have random voltage drops on certain lines that would cause GPU issues

@@cosy_sweater i've had a similar issue, it was my motherboard doing silly things to the RAM voltage which sometimes crashed my entire PC, what motherboard do you have?

That's a state of the art approach, but what's "better" or "worse" really depends on your goals and target hardware ;)

@@juliandurchholz its not really state of the art, its close to 10 years old at this point. It ran great back then, and if you cant run foxels, you might as well give up running anything serious. Also it looks great in comparison with the nonsensical method proposed in this video.

@@rednicstone3299 Yeah. they were first used in Assassin's Creed Black Flag for XBone and PS4 if I'm not mistaken.

@@rednicstone3299 Well, RDR2 and Last of Us 2 use it, for instance. What more modern approaches would you say it's been succeeded by?

​@@juliandurchholz"state of the art" technically just means "what the people that know what they're doing use", but the common use is "just invented, best available way to do something".

I agree, it's certainly no volumetric light system. Definitely cool, but more a highly specific trick than anything else. Unrelatedly, the CPU readback being involved immediately makes me dislike the technique. It would be slightly less painful if they operated on the opacity data in a compute shader. Kind of does get me thinking about some kind of cached (perhaps voxel based) approach though.

As long as the trees are also receiving shadows, I imagine you could do the same technique at the edges of those shadows. Looking at the window lighting that inspired this technique, I'd expect it to be one of those things like billboarding where it's "good enough" until you really pay attention to it.

Can you please elaborate on your second sentence about a few hundred beams and homogenous volumes? Great point about checking from the floor up. An enhancement could be to check the min and max shadow depth values of each sample, then render the beam between the highest position and the lowest position (using the same opacity formula)

@kabinet0 persistent mapped buffers and fences allow the CPU readback to happen asynchronously. With 2048 beams that's 2048 * 6 floats * 4 bytes = 49kb of data, which isn't enough to cause a bottleneck

@@Vercidium Your aproximation looks somewhat plausible in a scene with very spotty coverage such as bellow trees. A swiss cheese world would also apply hahaha. But try doing that in a wide open landscape. You will still have a bunch of randomly scattered beams instead of a homogeneous solid fog volume. The random beams will make no sense (what is dividing light up into small spot-light-like rays in an open sky?". It will look more like rain than fog in that context. I said "few hundred" out of guesswork. I dont know how many billboards you are actually spawning across the scene. But still, in reasonably consistent and robust implementations of god-rays the same fog that creates these small beams in some scenes, is the fog that creates a dense Z-buffer-fog-like effect in other contexts. Its all recreations of real-world light scatering and shadowing interacting. For good reference of how broad the effect is, take a look at a RDR2 presentation on their atmospherics system they show comparisons to real world and artistic depictions of the same phenomena. AC4:BF also has a description of their implementation in a graphics presentation of theirs, which I believe was the firsr shipping "Froxel" solution. TLoU2 also has an extensive presentation on myriad optimisations and quality improvements they did to it. All that said, what you came up with is still a clever little hack that can work in specific scenes. For a broader game you'll probably want some artist control over where billboards spawn and where they don't, so they are limited to places where they look plausible. If you have a clearing in the forest for example, you'd want to have no beams in the middle of it because then again, they'd lool like weird rain in that context instead of light. Even for a window, your solution might look inproper once you have dinamic objects. Since oclusion is checked from the floor, if a character steps in front of the window, not only will the beams be bocked from reaching the floor, they will misteriously not even hit the character either. A tall enough window and a short enough dynamic object can create a very visible effect of a moving object magically making the sun-rays disapear from the window as long as it passes over the sun-lit part of the floor. PS: I just rewatched the video and remembered your trick is to only draw beams "at the edge of light". Yeah, that reduces the occurance of the "light looking like rain" problem I described. Yet, the reality is that those wide open spaces should also have the volumetric light in them (including the ocean) just instead of scattered beams, it should be a larger volume. Your solution emulates the "feeling" of a subset of a light phonomena, rather than the real thing. Thats why I recomened looking up the RDR2 presentation, they really explain all the different cases where atmospheric scatering can influence a scene.

Hahahaha 😂

you forgot that to expect to run at calculator

It does look better but 100 times better is pretty close to 70 times which his how much performance is saved, so tbh, worth it maybe?

@@trued7461 there is probably a middle ground where you gain a little bit of performance and it actually looks the same. But from those images it ain't it chief

They could be made wider. Maybe dynamically. They're pencil thin. Maybe if they're full opacity they're also double width and you scale the same as opacity...

It still could be useful for mobile game development.

For people with potato PC's is much better than disabling the effects all together

Thanks Zeth! I agree, we need more videos about lighting

😂😂😂😂

I haven't heard of epipolar sampling, I'll check that out thank you! I have a 10700F CPU and an RTX 3070 GPU

@@Vercidium i dont know what both of you are talking about. the other person never said epipolar sampling. am i missing something?

@@abhishekak9619 epipolar sampling is in the 2nd last paragraph of the original comment here

@@Vercidium oh i see now.

Even Crysis 3 uses them, and still looks stunning. But such usage is limited to static scenes only. For dynamic things Crysis 3 uses screen-space Godrays effect. Works pretty well.

I think it's fair if the output looks comparable to the human eye. The thing that is being optimised is the graphical output, not the completion of a specific process. The fast inverse square Quake is a classic example. If someone replaced the true inverse square with the fast inverse square, I'd certainly consider that an optimisation even though it technically gives a slightly different output and technically isn't the inverse square.

@@perplexedon9834 Sure, sure. Some results different techniques. Not "optimization".

That's why it's much faster, it was reengineered. It is less acurate but still looks good like transforming a map into a grid for pathfinding

@@survival_man7746 I'm just being pedantic about the word "optimize"

Just added it, thanks for letting me know!

Thanks so much!

Yeah, this channel is so much fun and inspiring for people like us who want to get involved in engine and optimization stuff. Probably not for those who think they know everything already, but great for me. I wish there was more contents and devlogs like this. It's like a light in the darkness.

That means a lot to hear, thank you

Idk this seems like the video is a product of hyper focus and that outta the box thinking. ADHD all over it

If you want to, you can apply these optimization techniques yourself to other engines, though that means throwing away what the engine itself offers and writing things from scratch, while also building it in such a way that it works with all the other parts of the engine.

This should be possible in any engine that supports shadows and vertex readback. For example Valheim uses a custom render pipeline within Unity, I reckon they could add beams of sunlight like this.

Hahaha thank you

This is the norm now with majority of youtube channels. Titles and thumbnails like these drive curiosity and get people to click on the video. Then the creator increases the viewer watchtime by being as vague as possible for the first minute or so to game the system and boost the video's popularity. The downside being that if you aren't staying up to date with every new video, old content is almost impossible to find via search.

Thank you :) I come up with 5-10 different titles and thumbnails for each video and test each of them, then leave it on the one that brought in the most views. It's all an algorithmic game

That’s deep. I can relate to this

Hahaha thank you

Thank you!

beat me to it 😔

Thank you! I've just added it

Too kind, thank you!

Thank you!

Thank you :)

Take a look at Acerola's series on modern grass in video games, it's a really good watch and describes pretty much exactly what you're talking about.

^ Acerola's video on grass is excellent. My grass rendering is still pretty naïve, I have a lot to learn about vegetation rendering

@@Vercidium i think Acerola's approach laks your way of optimising memory for meshes by using only vertex indices. Also you have your own engine and probably don't need to run a compute shader each frame just to have a vertex buffer filled (that's what DrawMeshInstancedIndirect does in unity i think). Would really love to see how you implement grass, probably in future videos

Thank you for the recommendation, I'll check it out

Haha glad you liked it!

Haha too kind!

Hahaha thanks

@@Vercidium why the fuck are you responding to me, there are genuine great questions down here you can read rather than read our shitpost.

Haha thank you. I had to render it at half speed as my GPU couldn't render all 3 scenes at 60 FPS

Thank you but the devs at Unreal are a lot smarter than I am haha

@@Vercidium I definitely think you're smart, but you do have a point though. I've seen some Unreal Engine source code and it's some black magic hooha what they do there sometimes. Love your content tho, I learn a lot from you too!

Thank you, it’s all done using code and then screen recorded. I used C# and SkiaSharp for the diagrams, and RichTextKit for the syntax highlighting

I guess you could turn accumulation off on these moments and it should look alright

also i guess make the sprite used for the beams less blurred, to make it look higher res

Yes that's true haha, I'd like to fix that. You'd only notice it in a timelapse as the sun moves pretty slowly in-game.

That's a great idea! I could shift the beam towards the samples that are in the light

Thank you! It's a simulation, I used GL_POINTS to render each pixel, using the colour from the final image. Each pixel was then positioned by sampling the depth buffer in the vertex shader, then re-creating its 3D position from the depth value. I don't fully understand the matrix math, but it's explained well here: stackoverflow.com/questions/32227283/getting-world-position-from-depth-buffer-value

@@Vercidium Wow, impressive. Thanks for the explanation.