Rendering Tiny Glades With Entirely Too Much Ray Marching

There is lots of cool innovation happening in game tech still. Look at games like Noita, Dreams and Teardown. Or for an even more recent game, look at Tiny Glade. There’s a recent tech talk about it which is full of wizardry: link to this video There is also lots of cool tech happening at the more foundational levels in engines and frameworks, for example Epic’s Nanite/Lumen/MegaLights in UE5.

> Cell required Assembly programming Demoscene skill level to make good use of them, there was a C sdk, but really you wanted to write Assembly, and relatively tricky Assembly at it. > It is one of the reasons why Playstation 3 is the less celebrated one, and the console generation where XBox was able to pull ahead. In retrospect, Cell was a great architecture. In typical Sony fashion it was simply a few years too early. At the time games were single-threaded and many console games still expected CPU and GPU to be in sync. On the PS2, the difference between using the vector accelerator or not was 1.4x – many developers never bothered. But on the PS3 this was simply not an option, as the perf…

TinyGlade's (co)developer said he's very satisfied with Rust and the crate ecosystem. They've used Bevy's ECS: link to this video Using individual components instead of the whole big framework isn't necessarily a failure. The components are designed to be usable independently. TinyGlade project started a few years ago, when Bevy's rendering was even more basic. The art style is central to TinyGlade's appeal, so it's not surprising they've built a custom renderer.

…going to be possible for much smaller teams to deliver realistic and creative (see e.g. Dreams0) visuals with far less engineering effort. Some nice recent examples of this are Teardown1 and Tiny Glade2. It's even more inevitable from today's point of view than it was back in the 90s :) 0 Dreams: link 1 Teardown: link 2 Tiny Glade: link to this video…