Aras Pranckevičius @aras@mastodon.gamedev.place

So! "Tiny Mode" for Unity (aka "unity for small things") is in public preview right now. Get 2018.3 beta and grab the Tiny Mode package; more info in the blog post https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/12/05/project-tiny-preview-package-is-here/

Monday mornings are for solving hard problems!

"How does a GPU shader core work?", a talk I just gave for junior employees here. Basically an almost exact copy of Kayvon Fatahalian's Siggraph'08-10 BPS course material. http://aras-p.info/texts/files/2018Academy%20-%20GPU.pdf

Because "why not", I made my toy path tracer run in the browser via WebAssembly. Was pretty easy! http://aras-p.info/blog/2018/11/16/Pathtracer-17-WebAssembly/

The most excellent and lamentable tragedy of Flat UI Design, in two acts.

Video of Unity Roadmap session from #UniteLA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_DOrBpOvG0 -- Great to see lots of goodies coming in :)

So! Unity 2019.1 alpha 8 is out, with experimental "Incremental Garbage Collector" for C# folks, and "real actual Constant Buffer APIs" for graphics folks. And other things. https://unity3d.com/unity/alpha/2019.1.0a8

LTTP, but Travis CI is pretty cool. Getting automagic build+test on Windows+Mac+Linux e.g. in my SMOL-V github project was way easier than expected; just by having this file: https://github.com/aras-p/smol-v/blob/master/.travis.yml

For Vulkan shader compression, I have compared my own SMOL-V with SPIRV-Tools "MARK-V" codec, and found some things: http://aras-p.info/blog/2018/10/31/SPIR-V-Compression-SMOL-vs-MARK/

TL;DR: MARK-V compresses well, is a giant executable, and very slow.

I updated my toy path tracer Unity C# Burst code with a 4-wide HitSpheres implementation. PC 84->133 Mray/s, Mac 36->60 Mray/s. http://aras-p.info/blog/2018/10/29/Pathtracer-16-Burst-SIMD-Optimization/

I just updated SMOL-V (library that makes Vulkan shaders more compressible) to accept SPIR-V versions 1.2 and 1.3, e.g. as produced by Microsoft's DXC. https://github.com/aras-p/smol-v

I did an interview with lovely folks at "Isetta Engine" (student team at CMU) a while ago, and they managed to edit my random rambling into something that resembles coherent thought! https://isetta.io/interviews/ArasPranckevicius-interview/ -- on graphics, modularity, API design, random other stuff.

Is good Friday. Removing https://github.com/aras-p/hlsl2glslfork and https://github.com/aras-p/glsl-optimizer from Unity main codebase, since we stopped using them a while ago. They served a good purpose between 2010 and ~2017, but time to let go.

This interview with Amandine Coget (@LiaSae on twitter) is great and touches on many important topics rarely talked about: onboarding, usability, grokking large codebases, backwards compat etc. Good stuff. https://isetta.io/interviews/AmandineCoget-interview/

It took a while, but Terrain system and tooling in Unity is getting some updates ;) https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/10/10/2018-3-terrain-update-getting-started/

This post on code comments by Redis author is great http://antirez.com/news/124

I did a talk on Entity Component Systems & Data Oriented Design for junior/future engineers here at Unity (not Unity specific at all). Slides: http://aras-p.info/texts/files/2018Academy%20-%20ECS-DoD.pdf and toy project (C++) for it: https://github.com/aras-p/dod-playground