The Curious Engineer

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’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
362 from 5 Feb 2005 to 5 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (9 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 7

  1. Unroll a loop, make shader 10x faster
  2. Fast blur with animated radius
  3. More Blender VSE tidbits
  4. Joys of cancelling a TBB task group
  5. Unity vs floating point
  6. Syntonic Dentiforms redux
  7. Rapidhash Unity port

2025 9

  1. Two years of Blender VSE
  2. OpenEXR vs tinyexr
  3. This many points is surely out of scope!
  4. Lossless Float Image Compression
  5. Voronoi, Hashing and OSL
  6. Blender FBX importer via ufbx
  7. US New Orleans Trip 2025
  8. Surface-Stable Fractal Dither on Playdate
  9. Doom in Blender VSE

2024 9

  1. Verbosity of coding styles
  2. A year in Blender VSE land
  3. Vector math library codegen in Debug
  4. Random thoughts about Unity
  5. More Blender VSE stuff for 4.2
  6. Kyrgyzstan Trip 2024
  7. Crank the World: Playdate demo
  8. I accidentally Blender VSE
  9. Two years ago: left Unity

2023 14

  1. Gaussian explosion
  2. Making Gaussian Splats more smaller
  3. Making Gaussian Splats smaller
  4. Gaussian Splatting is pretty cool!
  5. Float Compression 9: LZSSE and Lizard
  6. Float Compression 8: Blosc
  7. Float Compression 7: More Filtering Optimization
  8. Float Compression 6: Filtering Optimization
  9. Float Compression 5: Science!
  10. Float Compression 4: Mesh Optimizer
  11. Float Compression 3: Filters
  12. Float Compression 2: Oodleflate
  13. Float Compression 1: Generic
  14. Float Compression 0: Intro

2022 7

  1. Swallowing the elephant into Blender
  2. Comparing BCn texture decoders
  3. Comparing .obj parse libraries
  4. Speeding up Blender .obj import
  5. Optimizing Oklab gradients
  6. Curious lack of sprintf scaling
  7. Speeding up Blender .obj export

2021 7

  1. Gradients in linear space aren't better
  2. EXR: Filtering and ZFP
  3. EXR: libdeflate is great
  4. EXR: Zstandard compression
  5. EXR: Zip compression levels
  6. EXR: Lossless Compression
  7. Texture Compression on Apple M1

2020 4

  1. Texture Compression in 2020
  2. Black Hole Demo
  3. Various details about Handles
  4. Fourteen years at Unity o_O

2019 9

  1. It's Raining Cubes
  2. Clang Build Analyzer
  3. Replacing a live system is really hard
  4. Two years in a build team!
  5. 'Infinite' sky shader for Unity
  6. Another cool MSVC flag: /d1reportTime
  7. time-trace: timeline / flame chart profiler for Clang
  8. Investigating compile times, and Clang -ftime-report
  9. Mentoring: You Won't Believe What Happened Next!

2018 30

  1. "Modern" C++ Lamentations
  2. C++11 way of initializing integers
  3. Pathtracer 17: WebAssembly
  4. SPIR-V Compression: SMOL vs MARK
  5. Pathtracer 16: Burst SIMD Optimization
  6. Random list of Demoscene Demos
  7. Pathtracer 15: Pause & Links
  8. Iceland Vacation 2018
  9. Pathtracer 14: iOS
  10. Pathtracer 13: GPU threadgroup memory is useful!
  11. Daily Pathtracer 12: GPU Buffer-Oriented D3D11
  12. Daily Pathtracer 11: Buffer-Oriented
  13. Daily Pathtracer 10: Update C#&GPU
  14. Daily Pathtracer 9: A wild ryg appears
  15. Daily Pathtracer 8: SSE HitSpheres
  16. Daily Pathtracer Part 7: Initial SIMD
  17. Daily Pathtracer Part 6: D3D11 GPU
  18. Daily Pathtracer Part 5: Metal GPU!
  19. Daily Pathtracer Part 4: Fixes & Mitsuba
  20. Daily Pathtracer Part 3: C# & Unity & Burst
  21. Daily Pathtracer Part 2: Fix Stupid
  22. Daily Pathtracer Part 1: Initial C++
  23. Daily Pathtracer Part 0: Intro
  24. Random Thoughts on Raytracing
  25. Unity in 2018
  26. UWP/WinRT Headers are Fun (not)
  27. Header Hero Improvements
  28. Helped to Build a School in Cameroon
  29. Minimizing <windows.h>
  30. 2017 Holidays Giveaway

2017 18

  1. Gamedev Mastodon: mastodon.gamedev.place
  2. Slow to Compile Table Initializers
  3. Best unknown MSVC flag: d2cgsummary
  4. Forced Inlining Might Be Slow
  5. Six Months in a Service Team
  6. Unreasonable Effectiveness of Profilers
  7. South Korea Vacation Report 2017
  8. Solar Roof
  9. User's POV and Empathy
  10. How does Visual Studio pick default config/platform?
  11. A case of slow Visual Studio project open times
  12. Developer Tooling, a week in
  13. Stopping graphics, going to build engineering
  14. Font Rendering is Getting Interesting
  15. Every Possible Scalability Limit Will Be Reached
  16. UI is hard, and other Typical Work Stories
  17. Chrome Tracing as Profiler Frontend
  18. A look at 2016, and onto 2017

2016 11

  1. Amazing Optimizers, or Compile Time Tests
  2. Interview questions
  3. Shader Compression: Some Data
  4. SPIR-V Compression
  5. More Hash Function Tests
  6. Hash Functions all the way down
  7. Adam Demo production talk at CGEvent
  8. Maldives Vacation Report 2016
  9. Solving DX9 Half-Pixel Offset
  10. Backporting Fixes and Shuffling Branches
  11. 10 Years at Unity

2015 8

  1. Careful With That STL map insert, Eugene
  2. Optimizing Unity Renderer Part 3: Fixed Function Removal
  3. Optimizing Unity Renderer Part 2: Cleanups
  4. Optimizing Unity Renderer Part 1: Intro
  5. Random Thoughts on New Explicit Graphics APIs
  6. Optimizing Shader Info Loading, or Look at Yer Data!
  7. Curious Case of Slow Texture Importing, and xperf
  8. Divide and Conquer Debugging

2014 8

  1. Importing cubemaps from single images
  2. US Vacation Report 2014
  3. Rant about rants about OpenGL
  4. Shader compilation in Unity 4.5
  5. Visuals in some great games
  6. Cross Platform Shaders in 2014
  7. Speaking at i3D and GDC 2014
  8. Rough sorting by depth

2013 7

  1. Some Unity codebase stats
  2. On having an ambitious vision
  3. Inter-process Communication: How?
  4. Iceland Vacation Report
  5. Reviewing ALL THE CODE
  6. Mobile Hardware Stats (and more)
  7. "Parallel for" in Apple's GCD

2012 6

  1. Adventures in 3D Printing
  2. Non Power of Two Textures
  3. Cross Platform Shaders in 2012
  4. Careful with That Initializer, Eugene
  5. Tiled Forward Shading links
  6. 2012 Theory for Forward Rendering

2011 12

  1. Prophets and duct-tapers or: useful programmer traits
  2. Fast Mobile Shaders or, I did a talk at SIGGRAPH!
  3. Testing Graphics Code, 4 years later
  4. Notes on Native Client & Pepper Plugin API
  5. A way to visualize mip levels
  6. Mercurial/Kiln experience so far
  7. Stories of Universities
  8. Mobile graphics API wishlist: some features
  9. Mobile graphics API wishlist: performance
  10. A Non-Uniform Work Distribution
  11. The Virtual and No-Virtual
  12. iOS shader tricks, or it's 2001 all over again

2010 6

  1. GLSL Optimizer
  2. Surface Shaders, one year later
  3. Compiling HLSL into GLSL in 2010
  4. GDC 2010 report
  5. Screenspace vs. mip-mapping
  6. Four years ago today...

2009 23

  1. Direct3D GPU Hacks
  2. Improving C#/Mono for Games
  3. Deferred Cascaded Shadow Maps
  4. Fixing bugs, in Tom Waits' words
  5. Strided blur and other tips for SSAO
  6. Usability depends on context!
  7. Talks & Demos from Assembly 2009
  8. Compact Normal Storage for small g-buffers
  9. Encoding floats to RGBA - the final?
  10. Implementing fixed function T&L in vertex shaders
  11. Shaders must die, part 3
  12. Shaders must die, part 2
  13. Shaders must die
  14. Google O3D - it's going to be interesting
  15. All games in one short paragraph
  16. Unity 2.5 is out
  17. Another Vista review (after 6 months of usage)
  18. How view on C++ changes over time
  19. LTGameJam 2009 postmortem
  20. Off to game jam
  21. Twitter! Twitter!
  22. Fixed function lighting in vertex shader - how?
  23. Quote of the day

2008 38

  1. ARB_draw_buffers
  2. Achievement of the week: MakeVistaDWMHappyDance
  3. Don't try to outsmart the compiler
  4. Cool tech vs. boring details
  5. Crunchtime!
  6. Windows 7
  7. The awesome support we do
  8. Unite 2008
  9. Implicit to-pointer operators must die!
  10. How to announce anything
  11. How watchdog threads should NOT be done...
  12. s/deity/demoscene/g
  13. Hardware of the casual gamer
  14. OpenGL 3: a big step in no direction at all?
  15. Uh-oh, this can't be good
  16. It must be a bug in OS/compiler/...
  17. Pixar's Brad Bird on Innovation
  18. Invincible shutdown buttons!
  19. I can has vertex?
  20. Encoding floats to RGBA, again
  21. Depth bias and the power of deceiving yourself
  22. OpenCL?
  23. The problem with Vista
  24. Amazing! Demoscene news that actually make sense!
  25. Argh MFC!
  26. Lolshadows strike again
  27. On job titles and design patterns
  28. One-liners: biawesome filtering
  29. Tricky bugs: peculiarities of dynamic linking, and magic divisions
  30. SwiftShader 2.0 experience
  31. New random blog
  32. What is Intel up to?
  33. Dogfooding: PeaNinjas part 1
  34. My experience with Crysis so far
  35. Off-Road Velociraptor Safari
  36. Holy FPU precision, Batman!
  37. What's taking up space in your programs?
  38. About two years ago...

2007 34

  1. What if eyes were orthographic?
  2. Hi, this is me
  3. Kindernoiser!
  4. Oblique near plane with orthographic camera
  5. What OpenGL actually needs
  6. Splume!
  7. Unity 2.0 is out
  8. San Francisco!
  9. Is OpenGL really faster than D3D9?
  10. Demos and politics
  11. Lolshadows!
  12. Testing graphics code
  13. Can you set OpenGL states independently?
  14. Electronic Arts STL
  15. "You should see the post-mortems"
  16. Debugging story: video memory leaks
  17. Encoding floats to RGBA, redux
  18. My battery is better than yours
  19. OpenGL pbuffers suck!
  20. We'd better write software
  21. Now that's what I call a good API (stb_image)
  22. Hey, 4 kilobyte intros are starting to get interesting!
  23. MegaPixel on shockwave.com
  24. It's harder than "just use shaders"!
  25. Wanna see what a camera looks like?
  26. Small article on matrices
  27. Who writes software nowadays?
  28. Blog moved
  29. ARB_vertex_buffer_object is stupid
  30. Back from Seattle
  31. A day well spent (encoding floats to RGBA)
  32. There's more than one me out there!
  33. Getting political (Iraq)...
  34. What's wrong with this code?

2006 16

  1. Wii or spirit of evil
  2. Quote of the month
  3. A steam of random things
  4. Painting and wallpapering
  5. A day in the life...
  6. On work and clean code
  7. Windows on a Mac experience
  8. Back to some shader programming
  9. It's always unexpected
  10. OOP and other things now and then
  11. Threading woes
  12. Why doesn't this feature exist?
  13. The holy grail of shadows
  14. Pair programming / animations
  15. Switched jobs - (almost) back in this crazy industry
  16. Zen bondage!

2005 79

  1. 64k coding continued
  2. Speculation: pipelining geometry shaders
  3. Reading DX10 docs...
  4. Pakimono!
  5. Lost Garden
  6. A crazy thought: 64k intro
  7. HDR with MSAA demo
  8. More HDR woes
  9. Debugging plus
  10. Jumped onto HDR bandwagon
  11. Bought Rag Doll Kung Fu
  12. Listening
  13. An article on efficient D3DX Effects state management
  14. Rag Doll Kung Fu
  15. State management in D3DX Effects #2
  16. State management in D3DX Effects
  17. Dingus redux at Pilgrimage'05
  18. C++ clunkiness
  19. InteraMotion closes offices
  20. Project Hoshimi 2006
  21. The Escapist
  22. Doing something
  23. Software of the week
  24. Guns & games
  25. What's in the engine?
  26. Back #2 - tiny photos from Japan
  27. Back
  28. Vacation!
  29. Press releases and other noise
  30. Immediate mode GUI
  31. Some new books
  32. Reading Siggraph 2005 papers...
  33. Mesh seamless texturing tool released
  34. On some demos
  35. Japan, here we come
  36. While waiting for ImagineCup results...
  37. Various
  38. Demo engine to game engine
  39. How to be creative
  40. Demo engine website
  41. 3D engine design redux
  42. 3D engine design
  43. Demo released!
  44. The new chair
  45. It all depends on the way you look
  46. Demo nearly finished!
  47. Work, work, work
  48. 24 / deadline's near
  49. Dilemmas
  50. Improving UV mapping skills
  51. Ambient occlusion takes ages to compute!
  52. Working efficiently
  53. A translation problem
  54. Master thesis weirdness
  55. Engine/demo sourcecode released
  56. Content shoveling
  57. A demo that still fascinates me
  58. Animation blending for walk/run
  59. Geoff Zatkin's essay
  60. I once wanted be a games programmer
  61. Oh no, it's a banana hotel!
  62. Sleep. Repeat.
  63. Not dead yet!
  64. Why the demoscene matters / Why we suck
  65. Demo progress: I'm morphing into an "artist"
  66. Blender: first try; UV mapping
  67. Ambient occlusion
  68. Code dependencies
  69. Software usability
  70. White stuff
  71. Scene.org awards
  72. Smooth shadows idea (not)
  73. Things to try
  74. A bunch of hacks
  75. Precalculated 2D fracture
  76. What makes me an awful team member
  77. ShaderX3
  78. Linear programming, redefined
  79. The video cards are damn fast