Making tools on the go

A-A-A-A-A*

Awww yisss! Everything* I wanted feature-wise from this tileset:
- Map declared in Multicolor SDF (lava is the base layer, everything else is boolean'd together)
- 4-corner Wang tiles extracted from TileSetter project (no, I didn't do those 96 tiles by hand) (package pending)
- Per-tile attributes in the "free" vec4 slot. Here - tile speed (also used for passability).
- A* path-finding with per-tile travel costs (the truck on the screenshot prefers flat terrain as ridges are slow to crawl).

* I have unused alternative biome tiles... to spice up the landscape 😏

Visibility is surprisingly tricky. Lots of implementation options, semantic options and how to combine those.

Subtleties of animation…
Had to slice the effect sprite into fg/bg parts and put them on different layers. And synchronize everything manually 😓

End of part 1

Been fever-dreamin' some DIY material layering and light sources (before I get to the chapter 7 of the second book).

The amount of noise from emissive materials is.. ugh. Apparently this is why we bother with "light sources" instead of just dropping some light bulbs here and there.

The next week, starting from AABBs and BVH

162s -> 26s -> 19s
(for a bit more complex scene)

Cubes are harder than they appear!

Night is the time for experiments [with monadic material composition]

Found this little gem while testing UV generation code

So, you're telling me now we're gonna add noise to the scene?

BVH is love, BVH is life 📦

Ramped up samples, bounces, and resolution and the rendering time is still less than the first attemts with the linear traversal of all objects in the world.

Converting interaction event into a single-constructor with additive, multiplicative, and scatter components helped a little too.

Also, skipped ray bouncing when attenuation drops below 10-bit range.
The limit practically remains to prevent infinite bounces between perfect mirrors.

The cat is out of the box[Goral84]!

[Goral84]: Cindy M. Goral, Kenneth E. Torrance, Donald P. Greenberg, and Bennett Battaile. 1984. Modeling the interaction of light between diffuse surfaces. SIGGRAPH Comput. Graph. 18, 3 (July 1984), 213–222. https://doi.org/10.1145/964965.808601