Render Graphs 🎨, WebGPU Mipmaps 🌐, AI Game Ads 🤖
⚙️ Next‑Gen Engines & Rendering
Inside Ashes of the Singularity II: Building a Truly ‘Next‑Gen’ RTS Engine
Ashes of the Singularity II is Oxide Games’ attempt to redefine “next-gen RTS” with constant, map-wide battles that still run smoothly on older PCs and Steam Deck. Powered by their custom Nitrous 3 engine, it pushes millions of particles, thousands of lights, and full off-screen simulation through aggressive multithreading, custom FX, and precompiled shaders. The team explains why they passed on Unreal, how they scale from 5‑year‑old hardware to 5090-class GPUs, and how they make massive-scale strategy work on a gamepad.
From Chaos to DAG: Implementing a Modern Render Graph in Your Engine
Managing dozens of Vulkan render passes by hand quickly turns into a mess of transitions and conditionals. This article introduces a render graph approach: passes implement Setup/Execute, declare resource dependencies via a builder, and let the graph compiler handle allocation, synchronization, and ordering. The author details lifetime analysis, building adjacency from resource usage, special cases for transient textures, and BFS-based pass culling from “root” passes. A final topological sort yields a clean, minimal frame schedule.
🧪 Graphics Experiments & WebGPU
Tired of Shadertoy’s Limits? Meet FragCoord.xyz
FragCoord.xyz is a new browser-based shader playground created by longtime Shadertoy user Xor to fix the pain points of the aging platform. He calls out issues like slow verification loops, clunky search, limited resolutions and exports, and missing features such as sliders, buffer previews, and time control. FragCoord is still very new and light on content, but it’s evolving rapidly with a more modern toolset. The post links to both sites and a video demo so you can see how FragCoord compares.
High-Quality Runtime Mipmaps in WebGPU: Inside spark.js’s Texture Pipeline
spark.js pushes mipmap generation from offline tools into runtime, using WebGPU to build full mip chains on the GPU and avoid transmitting extra data. The article shows how linear-space filtering, a sharp low-pass kernel, and smart alpha weighting/coverage preservation can dramatically improve texture quality over stock three.js and many existing pipelines. Along the way it dives into compute-based filtering, tiling optimizations, and format quirks across browsers. If you care about texture fidelity and bandwidth in your engine, this is a must-read.
📈 Game Dev Business & Tools
ByteBrew Ads Uses AI Cross-Promo to Boost Game LTV and Retention
ByteBrew has launched ByteBrew Ads, an AI-powered cross-promotion ad network that turns your existing players into a growth channel. Powered by its Ctrl engine, trained on petabytes of app data, it predicts high-value users and routes them to other titles in your portfolio based on LTV or retention goals. In tests across 100,000 users and five games, ByteBrew reports a 45% LTV uplift and 187% higher early retention. The mobile-first units plug into existing interstitial and rewarded placements, with self-service tools and built-in attribution.
From Layoff to Steam Hit: Inside ‘A Game About Feeding a Black Hole’
After being laid off from a high-paying tech job, Corey Darby used parental leave as runway to bet on indie gamedev—and landed a Steam hit with “A Game About Feeding a Black Hole.” In this deep-dive interview, he breaks down how he minimizes risk, prices smart, and designs “no-zero” games that are fun and commercially viable. He shares practical tactics around creator outreach, progression tuning, and bundles, plus the emotional rollercoaster of watching a surprise hit take off.