aarongeisler

Joined 13 years ago

Karma

80

Submissions

31

Member since

Jan 24

Solo dev building a game in C instead of using Unity like a normal person. Made Impaler. https://apptivus.net

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Recent submissions

Comment · 3 months ago

I still write games using OpenGL for the reasons described in the comments here. I've had very good results with it despite it being "old". It works on my MacBook, PC, and SteamDeck and it has yet to surprise me.

Comment · 3 months ago

I've had to wrestle with float precision issues writing physics code for games. Single precision floats do not behave well when you are doing calculations far from the origin (especially when doing subtractions). I ended up having to adopt double precision floats to track the camera and entity positions in my game with kilometer-scale environments. I've also had issues with floats when doing repeat transformations on a rotation basis without periodic orthonormalization.

Comment · 1 year ago

Yes, same experience. I recently played a "Wolfenstein" clone that frequently dipped into the the 30-60 fps range on my 3080. The original Wolfenstein used to run on a 386 if I'm not mistaken.

Ask HN: Game devs, how do you approach optimization? What would make it better?

5 aarongeisler 1 year ago 2 comments

Comment · 1 year ago

Thank you for sharing this. I linked it from my list of resources for C-based game development: https://github.com/aaron9000/c-game-resources

Comment · 1 year ago

Yep, familiar with this one - one of the best out there!

Comment · 1 year ago

I hope this catches on. For whatever reason, I haven't come across many gamedev-focused sites with good content. The gamedev subreddit is particularly disappointing.

Feebdack: agree with the other comments that the background image is a bit hard on the eyes.

Nice work!

Comment · 2 years ago

Agreed. Even with a top-end GPU I almost always turn off RT features. I expect we will continue to see hybrid RT approaches for the foreseeable future.

Comment · 2 years ago

Great post. There are lots of nostalgic game references here. I still remember being blown away by the shadows in the N64 Zelda many years ago.

I expect area lights and soft shadows to become the norm as ray-traced techniques are adopted. If you have the hardware, it's worth checking out Quake 2 RTX to see what the future might look like.

Lastly, I've added your blog to my growing list of graphics resources: https://github.com/aaron9000/c-game-resources

Comment · 2 years ago

This looks great! I am a big fan of the single header format. I've linked Clay from my list of game resources for C developers. Cheers!

https://github.com/aaron9000/c-game-resources

Comment · 2 years ago

Thank you, I will check these out - love what you are doing. Please keep it up.

Comment · 2 years ago

This is great! I added the link to my list of free game dev resources: https://github.com/aaron9000/c-game-resources

Is there a tool you used to create these materials that you would recommend?

Comment · 3 years ago

Yep! No issues with the Steam Overlay.

Comment · 3 years ago

I use Nuklear for a Steam game I made in C. It worked well for my needs but there are a few things I still haven't figured out yet - like rendering centered multi-line text. Localizing my game was very straightforward with Nuklear - I didn't run into any roadblocks with fonts or different alphabets. I was able to get the interfaces to be controller-friendly too. Overall, I had a positive experience and will use it again.

Comment · 3 years ago

I'm not suggesting C is better or that I made the correct choice here. My takeaway is that C is "doable" but not the most practical.