I’ve made a commitment to myself this year to learn more about low level programming. There are two parts to that effort.

The first is C++, a language with which I’ve had a love-hate relationship for years. I’ll talk in detail about this someday soon, but suffice it to say for now that I am trying to get more comfortable with all of the different quirks and responsibilities that come with that shambling mound of a language.

The second, which is, in its own hyper-specific way, both more interesting and less frustrating, is shaders. In case you don’t do this sort of thing much, shaders come in two basic flavours, vertex and pixel.

I don’t know where this goes, not yet. I’ve decided to write a talk for Gamedev NL, which will be a good way to crystallize whatever knowledge I gain in the process. Might not be the best possible presentation for the purpose, but we’re a small community, and I think people will appreciate it for whatever it is.

Shaders have long since hit criticality; they’re practically boring. You have only to look at sites like Shadertoy and ShaderFrog  to see that. But there’s something very spectacular about seeing the results of a tiny bit of code output the most realistic ocean you’ll never see, or the very foundations of life.

I mean, that’s cool, at least in my world. If you know how to build something like that, you got my vote for prom queen or whatever.

So that’s a thing I want a little more of in my life. I’ll talk about it as I go. I don’t have much specific purpose for this right now; Contension‘s not going to need this stuff for a good long time, but I’ll find something interesting to do with it.

Talk to you soon
mgb