Even though not every object in a 3D scene appears on the screen, their data is still sent to the GPU for processing, only to be discarded later in the rendering pipeline. This increases the number of draw calls needed to render the scene, which adds extra latency and processing costs. However, we could just pick the objects that lie inside the viewing volume of the camera and send only the data associated with this subset of entities to the...

I’ve prepared a concise summary of the lectures from https://learnopengl.com/ for a quick reference. This text explains graphics concepts without using visuals. OpenGL OpenGL is a cross-platform API for rendering graphics, maintained by the Khronos Group. It is a specification that must be implemented by GPU vendors (or third parties) and made available through graphics driver software. If you’re building your project with CMake and want to use OpenGL in your C++ application, your CMakeLists.txt should include the following commands:...

I’m writing this to reflect on my progress so far in making my own game engine, Kuki, that is named after my eldest cat. My journey began by following the tutorials at learnopengl.com to learn graphics programming. After some time, I realized that I was just copy-pasting code and running it locally. This is often the case with tutorials — without a clear goal, it’s easy to lose focus and interest. So, I wanted to do something meaningful with the...

Following my experiments with procedural map generation, I wanted to see some action on the maps I generated. So, I decided to add agents to the scene to observe how they navigate through the map. And, in order to make it look more interesting, I wanted the agents to behave intelligently and perform certain tasks. For navigation, I decided not to use Unity’s AI navigation package because I wanted to implement it myself. I specifically wanted to learn about the...

In recent months, I’ve been exploring procedural level generation techniques and algorithms to streamline the level design process for my future game projects so that I can spend more time on gameplay programming. While I haven’t delved into some of the more advanced stuff, I think I gained enough experience to quickly create levels suitable for various genres. In this post, I will talk about my progress in incorporating procedural map generation into a MOBA game I’ve been working on...

A few years ago, I discovered ANTLR while trying to build a parser for a custom config file format. By defining a simple grammar, I was able to get my work done. Then, I discovered the grammars-v4 repository on GitHub and looked at the existing grammars of the languages I knew at the time. I immediately noticed that the SystemVerilog grammar was incomplete and the Verilog grammar had many commented-out rules for some reason. I decided to contribute by completing...