Nico May

After nine years of development, meshoptimizer has reached its first major version, 1.0!

This release focuses on improvements in clusterization and simplification as well as stabilization. Here's a release announcement with more details on past, present and future; please RT!

meshoptimizer.org/v1

All it takes is commercial software -> company folds -> crowdfund open sourcing -> 20-25 years of improvements -> profit!

The paper has a later chart where “graphics” is bundled into “ImageSci”

Looks kinda like a pile of worms at phone-scale :D

Yeah… Having been looking at PC handhelds recently after years of only using fixed-clock consoles… it’s been a learning experience :D

But yeah on some devices you may be able to just lock to higher clocks for profiling (note these might still drop or crash if they hit thermal limits).

Vsync is a big one, a “smart” dynamic power system will only keep the clocks high enough to get frames out in time, so if you give it all the time up to the next vblank, and if you have fairly consistent frametimes, you may see it clock all the way down until it’s taking almost the whole time.

Note on some devices StablePowerState will be MUCH lower than peak clocks (or even average clocks). Eg. some devices can hit 2.5GHz+ sustained clocks, but stable power state will be like 900MHz.

If you are testing “real” perf, make sure you’re keeping the GPU as busy as possible (no vsync, etc)

YouTube video by /noclip The Making of Disco Elysium - Part One: Foundations

🚨NEW DOC ALERT🕹️

The Making of Disco Elysium - Part One: Foundations
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH6m...

After over 18 months of research, interviews & editing our Disco Elysium series is here.

In this first episode we focus on the cultural and personal foundations of the world of Elysium.

(This one is borrowed from work lol)

Yep I’m usually a book person, or watch some new movies, but never use the WiFi or games.

I think something like Firewatch is a nice equivalent to watching a movie though :D

I don’t think I travel enough to really want an Ally/Steamdeck/Whatever, prefer console at home, but understand it now.

Re-played the entirety of Firewatch on the plane, first time using one of these things “as a user”. Maybe I finally get the appeal :D

Makes sense! Yeah it’s definitely workable in PS. There’s some downsides with execution order but clearly it’s still shippable. Game looks great!

One downside is raytracing from a pixel shader hits some not-ideal perf issues, so you’d wanna do it from compute ideally, but then you can’t write the depth so you’re always gonna have mismatching borders around the hero object.

Is Keeper doing the ray-march in PS or CS?

(Since you’d get the logN scaling for RT traversal, but not pay the higher overall costs everywhere)

As an intern I did a little graphics sample that used proxies like yours except it did hardware ray tracing inside the proxy (rather than raymarch). Didn’t end up sharing the sample but I’d thought it’d let you have like a super-high-poly hero model while the rest of the scene was cheap raster.

Usually I just look at perf traces and go “you can’t do this”, so fixing it is up to the studio :D

Depends on title but you’d either want to choose an initial state that can refit to either final pose without massive stretching, or rebuild continually, or have a few set states and refit from the closest one sorta like the proxies.

I’m not sure what solution most titles go with tbh.

Thanks!

Door open/closed comes up for raytracing too lol, some really nasty perf if you just naively think you can get away with animating + refitting BVHs between the two states.

If these are pre-generated with openvdb, how many different proxies do you build, and how do you choose them?

Doing alright over there? You get a spotlight but only of stressful times :D

YouTube video by SIGGRAPH Advances in Real-Time Rendering SIGGRAPH 2025 Advances: STRAND-BASED HAIR AND FUR RENDERING IN INDIANA JONES AND THE GREAT CIRCLE

#SIGGRAPH2025 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course talk recording of "Strand-Based Hair And Fur Rendering In Indiana Jones and The Great Circle" by Sergei Kulikov from MachineGames is now online: youtu.be/jSE1XXBEK-w

I’d expect quadtree or grid yeah, I remember reading lots of articles about them for 2D games.

Maybe you could do something clever with rasterizing the enemies into an ID buffer or something and sampling the pixels for hits.

This illustrates the full process of capturing the "Essence" of a mesh to be used in a morph. The distance field is retrieved and then the mesh is projected onto the cube-shaped "screen" in order to pack its surface properties into two cubemaps.

How much of the geometry in a given scene is ray marched? Is even static stuff SDF, or just while morphing?

I noticed an @iquilezles.bsky.social thanks in the credits screen :D How much of the morph tech is SDF-based?

I wrote a neat morph system for Keeper and hopefully I can share a bit more about it in the future. This particular morph was an experiment using symmetry that didn't make it into the game in the end.

Columbo is the ideal for a point and click adventure game. He has a little comment for everything in the environment, he wanders around places freely, and he exhausts the dialogue tree of everyone he speaks to

Screenshot of Alan Wake 2 showing sunset on volumetric fog between trees.

Screenshot of Alan Wake 2 showing a view over a small town.

Screenshot of Alan Wake 2 showing sunset on volumetric fog between trees.

Gotta re-download Alan Wake 2 every once in a while just to remind myself how absurdly pretty it is.

I was like “wow one day of not checking CBC??”