jesse__

Probably the most interesting thing about it at the moment is the editor. The world, and most things in it, are represented as collections of SDFs. More accurately, they're density fields, but, potato-tomato. The world generator and editor operate almost entirely on the GPU. I've been writing a graph compiler similar in spirit to compilers that execute LLMs, with some key differences. The SDF 'program' gets jitted into a kind of bytecode and fed through an interpreter in the world gen shader. This way, the world gen and edits can be applied deterministically using one big fused program, and transferred back to CPU land using the async PCIe hardware. I get something on the order of ~99% ALU residency, 95% L2 hit rate and 20-40% vram bandwidth usage.

Compared to doing world gen on the CPU, it's so fast it feels like magic. It's taken me the better part of two years to get this working well.

One neat thing about representing the world as SDFs is they've been thoroughly researched and documented by a guy named Inigo Quilez, and they have a lot of nice mathematical properties. For example, you can do a smooth union of arbitrary SDFs to get nice rounded contours where shapes join.

I'll do some shameless self-promotion and leave some links here for anyone interested in looking at the engine, language code, or some pretty pictures.

  Location:  BC, Canada
  Remote:    Yes
  Relocate:  Unlikely
  Tech:      Windows Linux C C++ SIMD OpenGL WebGL WASM JS TS

  Github:    https://github.com/scallyw4g
  Portfolio: https://scallywag.software
  Résumé/CV: https://scallywag.software/resume.html
  Email:     jesse[at]scallywag[dot]software

  12 Years of Experience

Hello, my name is Jesse. If I was born to do one thing in this world, it's program computers.

I describe myself as a competent generalist; I'm frequently working on something I've never done before. I've worked at every level of the stack, from cycle-shaving hot SIMD loops to the frontend of large web applications. Coworkers have described me as "the best engineer I've ever worked with" surprisingly frequently.

My most recent professional experience has been about a year at a semiconductor startup; I worked on prototypes for an ISA, compiler, a cycle simulator, and a visual debugger.

As far as following development on the game .. I'll probably start doing marketing when I've got enough for a trailer. I'll announce updates on Discord and Youtube, if you'd like to follow along there

Probably the most interesting thing about it at the moment is the editor. The world, and most things in it, are represented as collections of SDFs. More accurately, they're density fields, but, potato-tomato.

Bonsai has undergone a large rewrite over the last couple years that's nearing completion. A world edit is defined as a bunch of SDF parameters which get projected/rasterized into the voxel grid by a shader on the GPU. One neat thing about SDFs is they've been thoroughly researched and documented by a guy named Inigo Quilez, and they have a lot of nice mathematical properties. For example, you can do a smooth union of arbitrary SDFs to get nice rounded contours where shapes join.

I've written every system from scratch, all the way from the memory allocators and font rasterizer to the collision detector and simulation loop. I even wrote a metaprogramming language as a replacement for C++ templates, which is a whole other story. IIRC the only external dependency is the C runtime library for starting the process and my very occasional use of variadic functions arguments.

For a long time, an explicit non-goal of the project was to ship a game. It sounded insane to me to write an entire 3D engine and then ship a game. As it turns out, I've gotten it to the point where I can actually make a game. I've got a start on the game systems in a closed-source repo, and hope to have a steam page for it by the end of the year.

I'll do some shameless self-promotion and leave some links here for anyone interested in looking at the engine, language code, or some pretty pictures.

Technologies : C, C++, SIMD, OpenGL, WebGL, WASM, JS, TS

Interests : systems programming, compilers, 2D & 3D graphics, performance

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Hello, my name is Jesse.

I describe myself as a competent generalist, and a lifelong learner. I'm frequently working on something I've never done before. I've worked at every level of the stack, from cycle-shaving hot loops to the frontend of large web applications. My most recent professional experience has been about a year at a semiconductor startup; I wrote prototypes for an ISA, compiler, a cycle simulator and visual debugger.

In terms of hard technical skills, I can quickly become productive in nearly any language, and at any level of the stack. I'm comfortable working in heavily multithreaded/async soft-realtime environments where performance is a key acceptance criteria. I have a good understanding of modern hardware architectures, including GPUs, from main memory to registers and instruction pipelines. I have working knowledge of interpreters, dynamic language runtimes and garbage collectors. I'm convinced I can learn nearly anything (albeit some things more quickly than others), given an appropriate problem domain to apply it to.

In terms of business value, I can take hand-wavy visions of new products and turn them into working prototype(s), quickly. I'm comfortable refining those raw materials and delivering real value to customers, internal or external. I have a track record of successfully identifying 80/20 solutions and love the feeling of making tools that make peoples lives better.

In my personal life, I enjoy travelling, surfing, climbing, backcountry skiing, snowmobiling, pirates, and attending raves. I like the phrase "have strong opinions, weakly held".

If I was born to do one thing in this world, it's program computers.

Jesse

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