Year in Review - 2024🔗

What went wrong and what went right for Renderling in 2024. Written 9 Jan, 2025

o/ Hi y'all!

Welcome to the Renderling wrap article for 2024. I'm hoping to make writing this article a tradition.

This project started with its first commit in Sep 26, 2022 - so I've been working on this for roughly two years as a side project, after my day job and between raising two kids.

Without looking at the log of work, which is simply my list of closed PRs on GitHub, I can already tell you that I feel like I've accomplished a lot for Renderling this year!

Sponsorships 💰🔗

• nlnet sponsorship

  This has been amazing, and has really changed my perspective on open source. The program has really been a guiding force for Renderling, and just knowing that people care about the outcome enough to invest in the project makes the overall quality of the software improve. Not to mention the fact that the money helps at a very basic level. I've already applied for 2025, 🤞. Thank you, nlnet!

  

• Second Half Games sponsorship

  And more specifically Lucien from Second Half ;)

  This sponsorship spun out of the work I was doing to unblock Renderling's shaders.

  You see, wgpu is a cross-platform graphics layer that Renderling sits on top of. This layer abstracts over the popular graphics libraries like DirectX, Vulkan, Metal, OpenGL, WebGL and WebGPU. It allows Renderling to target all platforms without too much platform-specific code.

  But it doesn't support all shader languages equally, and wgpu's SPIR-V support was lacking some features - notably support for atomics.

  Now this is important for Renderling because Renderling's shaders are all written in Rust, which then get compiled into SPIR-V, and atomics are an important building block when writing shaders. Oddly enough I've actually managed to avoid any use of atomics to this point, but that's changing very soon.

  Anyway, long story short - Lucien saw that I was tackling atomic support in the SPIR-V frontend of wgpu's shader translator and sponsored me to help fast-track that work, and I'm happy to say that the work is done!

  Thank you, Lucien!

  And if you haven't checked out Second Half's game, "Meanwhile in Sector 80", you should! It looks amazing!

  

• Other sponsorships

  I also had a few other sponsorships, one on-going from my long-time collaborator and friend Zach, and a generous one-time donation from John Nagle, who is working on Sharpview, a metaverse viewer.

  Also my buddy James Harton donated time on his machines for dedicated CI hardware.

  Thank you, guys!

Social 🤝🔗

• I've started fielding support questions on the Rust GameDev discord.

• There have been a couple reddit posts, not by me, mostly by John Nagle, aka Animats.

• GitHub stars have exploded this year:

Stars as of the end of 2024

• I also became a maintainer of the Rust-GPU project.

Next year my social goals will be to get more and better documentation out there, with more examples.

I'd also like to pull in some PRs from other folks, and possibly find a guest maintainer. If 2025's nlnet grant goes through I'd like to contract some of the project's milestones out, as there's more work than I can manage myself, and having another person in the codebase would be good for organization, and clarity and focus in the API.

I'd also like to write some small games 😈.

Work 👷🔗

Ok - let's enumerate the features and stuff added in 2024!

There were a lot of refactors and bug fixes, so I'm only going to mention the big rocks here.

• nested transforms

  Support for scene hierarchy through nodes that contain other nodes, where a "node" is a rendering of some sort (a Renderlet in Renderling parlance)

• physically based bloom

  A new bloom implementation based on learnopengl's guest article

• rebuild of the animation system

  Streamlined animation. Fixed some lingering bugs with rigging.

• atlas uses texture array

  Support for multiple textures in the atlas. This greatly expanded the texturing capacity.

• morph targets

  Support for animations using morph targets. These are important for facial animations, among other things.

• compute frustum culling

  Pre-rendering step that removes out-of-view geometry. Good speedup.

• WIP occlusion culling

  This would be a state of the art, two pass compute step to remove occluded geometry, but I put it aside during the debugging phase. I'll come back to this in 2025.

• cargo-gpu

  I put this here even though it's not exactly Renderling, but my shader compilation tools from Renderling became the basis of this new, more general command line tool. Along with the work of Thomas Buckley-Houston. We essentially mashed our compilation tools together to come up with cargo-gpu. Check it out!

Website🔗

Last but not least I have to mention that this entire bespoke website was set up this year, and I wrote 4300 lines in the devlog! That's a lot of debugging. But I do tend to make lots of newlines...

Here's the renderling.xyz code if you care to take a look. It's very much made in a style that works for my workflow, and I'm often adding to it.

Looking into 2025🔗

On my docket for 2025 are more features, documentation and examples.

I'd also love to work with an artist to get some good renderings to show off.

I guess I could always use some off-the-shelf assets, though.

Here's my feature short-list:

• shadow mapping

• finishing occlusion culling

• support for texture compression

• analytical light tiling

• a pinch of raymarching

• screen-space ambient occlusion

What went right and what went wrong🔗

Just about everything I mentioned up to this point went right. I got a lot of features shipped in what I think is a pretty short amount of time.

But one glaring difficulty I had was with occlusion culling. This wasn't part of my nlnet grant but I dedicated a good chunk of time to it. I felt like I was always just a couple hours away from finishing, but the rabbit hole got deeper and deeper. I think sinking this much time bumped a few other milestones out of reach for me in 2024 - namely shadow mapping and light tiling. Next year I'll make it one of my milestones, if I win another grant. Then I can really focus on it without worry.

You can read about occlusion culling in the devlog here.

Another problem is that packing in all these features has fractured the API a bit. The project doesn't feel very "well planned" to me... ...because it isn't! I've been working on just getting things to work and haven't put any polish on it. The APIs need a bit of work around the edges to ensure the pieces line up well.

All in all, though, I'm very happy with this project :)

And that's a wrap!🔗

I'm going to keep this short and sweet, so that's it for 2024.

Thanks for reading and following along.

I wish you the best in 2025!

<3