When Your Game Is Bad But Your Optimisation Is Genius 

Curious you said you're making a game engine, is it Open Source? Any chance I could get my stinking paws on it? I'd like to contribute if possible. If not, curious about what type of research you did beforehand, maybe see if you had any useful references for making an engine. It's something I'd like to give a try after my first game.

What LIBs/Tools do you use in game engine development?? I'm trying to dive deep and make developing Game Engines my entire focus in life, but I'm uncertain where to start, so I just been teaching myself Higher Maths while I try to find a starting point 😥

What do you use to make your videos? Is it Manim?

⁠​⁠@@monkeyhorizon hey it’s not open source currently but I have a few blog posts up and a GitHub account with accompanying code (it’s super old though) I plan to open source parts of the engine (terrain, vegetation lazy multithreading, particle engine, voxel destruction, skeletal animation, networking, importing models, UI, postprocessing, etc) and make videos + blogs about them I created this engine mostly through trial and error and a lot of time haha, unfortunately other engines are very closed-off, or only have vague talks and presentations about them. learnopengl.com taught me nearly everything I know about OpenGL, and my goal is for these videos to cover all the other aspects of creating a game engine

⁠​⁠@@Prodby.Mvl7R all of the code is custom, but if I were to start again I would use Silk .NET as it handles all the boring stuff for you (window creation, keyboard and mouse input, OpenGL setup), so you can focus on the cool 3D rendering side of things My maths knowledge and skills is terrible, I’ve made it a surprisingly long way without fully understanding how quaternions, matrices and lines/vectors work! I recommend jumping in and starting experimenting with 3D rendering with OpenGL. learnopengl.com taught me so much and was a great starting point

That is a great quote

This is actually true in my experience

So true. Sql to c++

@@Vercidiumit is , Imagine if JS had a hard limit of 2MB of RAM per page. Then maybe it would be real programming and would stop being a toy.

…that’s pretty much the reason why I deliberately target the Raspberry Pi 3 for development. If it runs well on that, it will run very well almost anywhere.

My mission is to reduce memory usage across the globe, so I'm glad this was helpful!

@@Vercidium Considering the choices the GPU vendors are making concerning the amount of memory on their cards, that's a great mission to have in life! :p Will help reduce the need for these extremely expensive cards, which I think would be a good thing. Now that I think of it, kind of a environmentally friendly thing too!

@@perhapsyes2493 yep it’s very easy to forget about all the gamers that use older hardware, not everyone has the latest tech. Lower specs means the game is more accessible too, it’s a win win

@@Vercidium That is also a deed in the mission of climate change. Unoptimised games are like gas guzzling cars. Use a lot of energy without getting anywhere.

Now let's plot the power draw of the system for the optimized vs unoptimized version. This is how we'll stop global warming...@@Vercidium

Exactly, leaning on raw compute power as a crutch is anti-innovative

If we had to graph it out: it seems as though hardware is rising, but software is becoming a straight line (or worse, declining) in performance and efficiency. Optimization can bring a whole lot more out of modern computers, and we don't even have to do unrealistic amounts of it to get much better results.

@@XeZrunner software is absolutely declining.

Yeah. I think it's a good thing that with modern tech programming is very accessible, and almost anyone can easily learn to write a working program. But the problem is that this also generates a lot of laziness in programming, since you no longer need to optimize to have your program run at all (or run well), so people just don't bother. And optimization is pretty much only done by people who personally care about it. I think that this won't stop things improving for as long as technology keeps improving. But it's holding us back at least a few years in progress.

@@XeZrunner can't agree more than that

That's a great alternative and avoids using sin and cos in the vertex shader

@@Vercidium What sort of percentage increase in FPS would you presume to see from rewriting that portion?

@@aidanm5578 it depends if the vertex shader is the bottleneck. If it isn’t, the FPS won’t change at all, but if it is maybe 5% faster? I can’t imagine the sin and cos being that expensive

@@Vercidium Fair enough. It's good to see you doing what the gaming industry seems to prioritise least. Keep it up mate, love from Perth.

@@aidanm5578 Honestly, I think those professional AAA programmers very much prioritize this because it's so basic. Their games are just so complex (especially with graphics) that they need very large teams and still lack manpower.

Thank you! I spent a bit too long on these animations so I’m glad they help

This is insane, amazing quality video, thank you

@@Vercidium I don't think you did. I feel like the engagement regarding the animations just brought the video to my recommended. Thanks!

@@Vercidium The work you did on the animations is by no means wasted. They were very aesthetically pleasing and helped the presentation of the video immensely. Amazing job on this video!

coding version of 3Blue1Brown

But if all games were optimized, you wouldn't buy new hardware every few months / years.

A) Dev time. You can optimize everything to a close to infinity time. More time = less achieved... because the more optimized, the less you gain. B) You have a game to release, you focus on making... well... the game.. and the QA team is not seeing any major issues, so it is fine... This one is more down to there exists infinite amount of hardware combinations... your game will hate some of those... period...

@@SioxerNikita And i'll add: An unreleased game is a money black hole. The earlier you can get it out, the better (to reduce the costs of making it). But of course, too early and it'll flop, not recovering the huge sums of money already put into it in its development time. You can never know for sure how much a game will make, so you can never know for sure for how long you can keep developing it and still be worth it.

@@Torekk What? Are you saying game developers are in cahoots with nvidia to make games bad on purpose so nvidia can sell more GPUs?

@@besknighter Yeap

Might I recommend kishimisu's intro to shader art. I'm a coder, one of my favorite ways to recreate.

I don't see them anymore, all I see is blonde, brunette... ;)

🔫 Always has been

… Always has been

Absolutely, I would love to experiment with that! Is that where distant terrain and trees get converted to billboards (sprites) that always face the player?

@@Vercidium Afaik, culling is usually skipping rendering of triangles, when they are outside the camera's view cone or sometimes even when they are occluded by other non-transparent triangles. I think what @SomoneElse-fr8yu is referring to is baking details from high resolution meshes into lower resolution meshes + displacement maps. This works best on details that the player can't see at sharp angles, so mostly flat floors or walls with details such as bricks and so on. Not sure what the process of converting mesh detail into displacement maps is called though.

@@Vercidium You should look at WARNO from Eugen Systems, the Iris Zoom engine does this and more when it comes to drawing the terrain and the trees ;)

@@InDieTasten as a normal person... best guess is parallax mapping

@@Vercidium Something else interesting to mess with related to bill boarding is drawing lines using sprites. It's very interesting, you can position a sprite between two points then scale it according to the length of the line between the two points, in 2d this will look terrible, but in 3d it works surprisingly well mostly because where one sprite fails another one will kick in to take its place. It's entirely possible to make a game with nothing but bill-boarded sprites and it can look very good even though it lacks the textured triangles so often used.

What do you mean? Can you give an example?

?

I have a little insight into how Vercidium creates these videos. The "animations" you see in his videos are not animated in any traditional sense. They're animated using code, which I think is so cool. Vercidium isn't animating anything (in the traditional sense), it's all just code!

​@@SatisfiedOnionits called procedural animation,moving bones from code

@@SatisfiedOnion Probably not everything, that intro would take 100x less time to make in something like After Effects

is college really that worth it

@@LavaCreeperPeople For game development? Unless you have spent years teaching yourself and developing games before reaching college age and wanting to get into the industry, absolutely. Otherwise, you are starting from scratch and you will not get a game dev job for years. Even if you teach yourself for years straight, there is a lot you will not learn without college, including how to properly work with teams and what the industry is like. I highly recommend Champlain College. They have degrees for each industry discipline and you worth together as teams of designers, programmers, artists, and producers for multiple years. It simulates an industry environment.

@@LavaCreeperPeople yes for anything

@@anonymousperson26223 trade school?

​@@anonymousperson26223heavily depends on the country, degree, specific college and your self study skills for example in quite a few countries you can find a job with skills and or work experience even without a college degree, in others you can't do anything without a degree then there's the issue of study discipline and motivation, I've met quite a few junior devs with a college degree that are barely able to write a solution to a fizz-buzz type problem

yeah

In a similar vein, I've been playing well optimized old games on newer hardware, and the experience is glorious. It can actually be a little annoying, because now I don't get to read the cool load screens anymore.

I’ll check it out thank you. If the same values are being passed to the texture sample call, what would cause the seams?

@Vercidium You're welcome. I'm not sure what you mean by "same values". Let's assume a uv coordinate where one fragment has uv.x == 1 and its neighboring fragment has uv.x == 0. In this case the GPU basically "thinks" that the whole texture is used between these two fragments and uses the smallest mip mapping level. That's what causes the seams as the color of the lowest mip mapping level will probably be different from the "correct" one. With "real" uvs that only happens if the texture actually is between those two fragments, e.g. a textured model only occupying one pixel on a screen. But since you are calculating the UVs based on the position, it will always happen where the UVs wrap as mentioned above. Ben Golus has some solutions in his article as well. Hope that helps. :)

​@@BrightBitGAMES As far as I can tell, the Ben Golus article and associated woes only apply to equirectangular projection textures onto a sphere. The reason the GPU assumes the whole texture must be present within the discontinuity is because the texture is being projected onto a single contiguous sphere mesh; the fragment shader sees a discontinuity within the same mesh and freaks out. This terrain generation code is not doing that: it is chunking the terrain into separate square meshes and composing them together into one scene, so there shouldn't be any visible seam. Caveat emptor: I'm a CUDA compute shader guy, not an OpenGL graphics shader guy, so I may be wrong.

When I first learned graphics programming, I was tricked into thinking instancing was the same as batching hah, so I'm glad you went over that. I had to rewrite all my rendering at the time 😥 Nice going over modern GL too, like multiDraw and SSBOs

@@Finding_Fortune I avoided modern OpenGL for so long because I thought it would increase the specs for the game. But I realised I can check the OpenGL version, and only use newer functions if they’re supported

If people optimized code the same amount as they used to, then games would take so long to develop that they would already be outdated by the time they were released. Modern games are much, much bigger than old games were, and it's simply unfeasible to spend the same amount of effort optimizing each individual feature when there are 1000x more features than there used to be.

Raytraced shadows while having a considerable performance penalty they also allow more features like: -longer shadow draw distance (effectively infinite) -no need for shadow cascades (the parts where shadows transition to better or worse quality ones for optimization reasons) -dynamic soft shadows -better shadows for dynamic lights (like a spotlight during the day) You could have these features with NO raytracing but it will have a higher performance cost

I also LOOVE the modern trend of just ignoring optimization in favor of scaling like FSR or DLSS

For ray tracing, it's more about being able to do it in certain ways very quickly that wasn't able to be done quickly prior without specialized hardware, so it just opens up a lot of new potential optimizations for the future. Ray tracing itself isn't a new thing (in more limited uses, ray tracing can be pretty quick actually, and has been used in games for a while) it's the hardware accelerated side of it that's new. I'd say this stuff is a pretty worthwhile graphical leap, just will take time to be fully utilized.

Ray traced lighting can be a pretty dramatic improvement in areas where rasterized techniques couldn't mimic realistic lighting very well, particularly dynamic global illumination. Recently developers have been getting a bit better at optimizing it, though most early executions were terribly optimized for the small benefits.

Get those orders ready! Thank you for the feedback

That means so much, thank you! I hope it’s useful for your games

This comment has made all the effort I put into this video worth it. My goal is to help other devs solve problems that had me stumped for months, and I hope my future videos have the same effect!

@@Vercidium I’m so glad I could voice something that could inspire you to keep going. Seriously, I’ve been looking for someone like you a while. Understanding where to start and where to go in coding is difficult. Having these tangible points explained so well has given intuitive guidance that I haven’t seen elsewhere

Thank you! Could say this video was 6 years in the making… and I have many more to share!

he didnt exactly invent any of these ideas...

@@masterhacker7065 i didnt say he invented, but he is making good videos about compute shaders

That is great to hear, thank you!

Thank you very much!

Welcome to the game dev life! Thank you, I hope these videos will make your journey a smooth one

This is one way of doing it, there's a few different techniques. You can also use quadtrees or clip maps, which are both very optimized ways of sorting your detail.

Woah thank you! Presenting and teaching are both skills I want to improve so this comment means a lot

Thank you! Making the animations was the most enjoyable part

Now that is good to know, I’ll try that thank you!

Sorry if my question is stupid, a bit new to graphics programming but won't we lose time by computing sqrts here, which I have heard is an expensive operation?

@@Sh-hg8kf it depends on its speed vs the other alternatives: running sin and cos, or reading a vec3 normal from memory I’ll have to benchmark sqrt vs sin, but I’m certain both are faster than reading more data from RAM

@@Vercidium I am confused. How would a memory read take longer than computing sins or sqrts unless we are heavily memory bottlenecked?

@@Sh-hg8kf sqrts are certainly slower than a simple polynomial but GPUs have very fast sqrt hardware, basic operations like normalize need a fast sqrt

That is awesome to hear, thank you so much!

@@Vercidium Keep them coming, man! I hope your dedication and your effort will make you big. Cheers!

Thanks so much! Glad you liked them, happy to answer any questions

Hey thanks man! And thank you for your advice for recording voiceovers

I will add that to my list of videos to create, will do!

yeah. something that is kind of from the start. I mean, anybody can install Unity and follow a couple tutorials. I did that, for a mechanical design course. the goal was just to get our models into a VR environment, but we did learn how to make said environment with buttons and moving stuff... what I'm saying, is that I don't know where to even begin, if I had to code from scratch

​@@Klaevinyou begin with... Google. there's a guy named TheCherno, he has a great series on opengl and c++ for beginners

Thank you! I would love to make one, shaders are pretty fun to muck around with

Thank you, it does feel exciting to move on to something new

Battlefield uses stitching to connect their LODs together, where they modify the edge of the higher-detailed mesh to match the lower-detailed mesh I tried this but it meant high quality terrain pops in when moving around the map, whereas with sinking it appears gradually

@@VercidiumSo the method that requires less coding also looks better. Double win.

Thanks! The best way to demonstrate optimised graphics is with optimised graphics

I did not come up with these by any means. These are optimisations I learned from a lot of trial and error, research and analysing other games.

Don't be overwhelmed by all the stuff there is to learn. Just because this type of optimization exists, doesn't mean you NEED to know it right away. I've been learning Unity all year and I barely understood a thing in the video. At the same time, I've never had to optimize anything to this level, because i'm not to the point where I'm making games complicated enough to need much optimization. If you're interested but nervous, check out the Learn Unity courses, it'll help a lot.

​@@mattc9598 I've been learning game dev for a few years, encompassing a lot of different aspects, and while I understand the concepts, I wouldn't even know where to start on the implementation. My experience with writing shaders was not the best.

@@mattc9598Knowing it ahead of time and implementing it early can save you lots of time and headache. It's always a pain to get something working but runs like trash and then you find out in order to optimize it properly you practically have to re-write a large chunk of code.

You won't get bored! As soon as you get rolling, you won't be able to stop. It's insanely fun learning why; how; and what can I use it for in my everyday experience on PC or otherwise?