Akshay M

YouTube video by GameDevArcana Hikari Physics Spheres

More progress made on the Hikari engine. After implementing per-frame BVH-updates, I now have collision-detection (and some minor physics) in place. 1000 balls bouncing around a terrain with 5 animated meshes. Pretty decent realtime perf. #gamedev #gameengine #gamephysics youtu.be/UGjnM480xtI

Switching to Release mode, the thing now refuses to go below 60FPS even with 80 such meshes, even when I switch to battery mode on my laptop! Good lesson as I am now going to optimize things in Debug mode at "low power" profiles so that the real thing has large safety factors built-in. #gamedev

I have a stress test for the game-engine I'm writing in which I have 20 animated meshes with 1m vertices with per-frame BVH calcs 3-levels deep on the CPU. Was at 1-2 FPS and a couple of months of optimizations led to ~20FPS. Then I realized I was compiling in Debug mode.🤦‍♂️ #gamedev

...into them motivated by human reasoning. It is not clear whether the training of these models would have led to CoT reasoning being "discovered" spontaneously by these models.

Repeat after me: Transformers are just glorified statistical distribution learners and still represent memory rather than logic. What they have demonstrated that a lot of what we do with text and images might be similar to this. But even the "reasoning" models have gating criteria built...

Sometimes I wonder why people keep making the claims about LLM intelligence that they do (Gemini 3 Pro used here). This is well within the reach of an 8-9 year old (with some patience!) whose energy budget, even while calculating this, is far below that of the hardware that runs these AI models.

Also, finished the Golden Kamuy manga (the final season of the anime is airing). Was pretty good till the middle but then stretched the story for far too long, imho. Nevertheless, very good overall and a very unique setting which educated me a lot about the history of Hokkaido and nearby regions.

Back from the holidays and my codebase feels completely alien to me.

I believe that, in 2025, gaming on Linux has taken an irreversible leap. I am not an early adopter by any means (I like stable platforms as a dev), but this is my Steam replay for 2025. #linuxgaming #steamonlinux

It dawned upon me last evening that cities tend to to outlast countries, kingdoms and even civilisations. And they are able to preserve part of their existing identity while amalgamating new ones. There is something very resilient about cities as a construct.

Finished the remaster of Myst (2021), my first time ever playing the franchise - I admit I had to use walkthroughs on more than one occasion! But what a game and quite a reminder of how minimalism can still lead to a thoroughly engrossing game! #myst #riven

Perhaps there will be drastically different stuff down the line, but the more I use AIs, the more I become convinced that the current crop will not replace us. The capabilities of the SotA LLMs seem to be saturating very quickly and they are becoming (very useful) tools rather than replacements.

Implemented real-time collision-detection in my engine using per-frame BVH calculation for animated meshes. The colliding objects have their BVH drawn in orange with the intersecting nodes highlighted in cyan. (Also some basic heightmaps and fog). Next step: actual physics! #gamedev #gameengine

Finished playing #Exit8 - very innovative and very inspiring if you are an indie gamedev.

Finally, glTF morph and skeletal animations implemented within the engine. And now a dynamic bounding volume hierarchy for both static and animated meshes being calculated in realtime. #gamedev #gameengine

Mt. Fuji while landing into Tokyo Haneda airport today. #tokyo #mtfuji

My hacky solution for this has been to generate single-pixel dummy textures even for meshes that do not need them and slotting them in manually (eg, an object may not need an emissive or occlusion texture but the shader has those samplers declared). Not a huge performance/memory cost but ugly.

And, as is the case for most shader bugs, zero feedback from the GPU, especially my NVidia one. Surprisingly, it was on an Apple M4 Pro GPU that I got some feedback from the driver alerting me to the root cause (ie, the shader expecting a slotted texture because a sampler uniform was declared).

Had a lot of trouble figuring out a weird bug where, if you declare a sampler2D texture-sampler uniform var in GLSL and there are no textures slotted in, the shader goes kaput even if the sampler itself is never used (gated by conditionals). And that was my main PBR shader for most meshes!

Added Apple Neural engine support as well through python bindings to whisper.cpp (via pywhispercpp). Feels like it helps battery life more as compared to using the MPS backend on pytorch. #pytorch #whispercpp

Got real-time bounding-volume hierarchy creation in place in my engine. The left mesh with the cans and drums has 300k triangles. #gamedev

Just saw on HN that ffmpeg added whisper support! Darn it! But kudos to them!: code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpe...

GitHub - charm137/STT-realtime: Python script to transcribe audio from mic or loopback utilizing whisper and LM Studio Python script to transcribe audio from mic or loopback utilizing whisper and LM Studio - charm137/STT-realtime

Wrote a tiny python utility script to transcribe a Japanese audio stream (mic/stereo playback etc) to English using whisper and an LLM hosted on LM Studio running fully locally your system. Useful while watching shows or for meetings etc. Code here: github.com/charm137/STT...

(correction: meant Anvil, not Snowdrop)

Also gotta say that a large focus this year seems to have been, unsurprisingly, on generative AI. Mixed feelings here but, given some of the things I saw, I'm increasingly accepting of GenAI as a productivity amplifier. Its percolation into workflows is inevitable, in any case. #SIGGRAPH

Attending my first ever #SIGGRAPH this year. Also had the privilege of attending Advances in Real Time Rendering for the first time as well. Amazing talks on the rendering innards of idTech 8 (superfast RT GI), Unreal 5 (megalights) and Snowdrop (GI/RT)! ReSTIR galore!