Wave Tracer 📡, GPU optimization 🚀, PIX profiling 🧪, Unity HDRP lighting 💡
🎮 Unity Design & Lighting
Build Smarter Targeting in Unity with the Combinator Pattern
Replace giant if-statements with tiny, reusable predicates composed via AND/OR/NOT in C#. This tutorial builds a Unity targeting system using a shared context, an IPred interface, and a fluent Chain builder for clean, immutable composition. Factory helpers and type aliases keep rules readable and easy to store. The same pattern scales to transforms, sequencing, and full AI behavior trees.
Lighting Emotion in Unity: Pixar-Proven Tricks for HDRP Scenes
Pixar lighting artist Alonso breaks down how to light Unity HDRP scenes that feel cinematic and emotional—while previewing his indie game, Node. Learn practical setups (volumetric fog, ACES tone mapping, gradient skies), performance-friendly bakes, and clever cheats like unlit “atmospheric emitters,” cookies, and IES profiles. He shows how to start from emotion and references, not “physical correctness,” to guide the eye and story. Packed with tips on iteration, organization, and avoiding flat, gamey lighting.
⚙️ GPU Profiling & Optimization
Master GPU Bottlenecks with Microsoft PIX (Unity + Unreal)
Learn a repeatable workflow to find and fix GPU bottlenecks using Microsoft PIX. The video covers setup, capturing frames from Unity and Unreal, and reading the timeline to spot costly passes like shadows, SSAO, motion vectors, Nanite, and TSR upscaling. You’ll see how URP differs from Unreal’s compute-heavy pipeline and how to iterate: baseline, analyze, tweak, and re-measure. Analyze first, then optimize for real, measurable gains.
Keeping VALUs Busy: Practical GPU Optimization for Modern Renderers
This deep dive shows how to keep GPU SIMD/VALU units busy by targeting real bottlenecks, not guesswork. Learn to profile passes, tune occupancy (even lower it), and pick the right shader stage—compute or pixel—based on ROP, cache, and divergence behavior. It also covers architecture-specific tips (RDNA wave sizes, wave intrinsics) and async compute overlap to harvest idle cycles. Practical, nuanced advice with caveats for different GPUs and workloads.
🧰 Languages & Next‑Gen Rendering
C vs. Odin for Game Dev: Pragmatic Trade-offs, Tools, and Traps
Ginger Bill (Odin) and Ryan Fleury (RAD Debugger) dive into when C still shines—long-lived, portable codebases with battle-tested toolchains—and where Odin’s cleaner design wins: slices, a sane build model, and fewer footguns. They unpack C’s worst offenders (implicit conversions, overloaded ‘static’, much of libc), macros as necessary evils, and why UB arguments are overblown. Expect practical guidance on arenas, error handling as values, and recommended learning paths like Handmade Hero and Quake II.
Beyond Rays: A Scalable Wave Tracer for Optical and RF Rendering
wave_tracer is an academic wave-optical path tracer that captures interference and diffraction by tracing elliptical cones. It targets both visible-spectrum rendering and long-wavelength simulations like cellular, WiFi, and radar. Though 5–20x slower than classical ray tracing, it scales robustly with scene complexity. Featuring rich spectral workflows and strongly typed physical units, it’s an early alpha built for research and advanced rendering experiments.