Thanks a bunch for GPUpad!

[DEF7]

I was just telling my friend how to get my deferred renderer up and running it was now a matter of writing a bunch of shaders (i.e. depth prepass, shadowmap rendering, g-buffer filling, g-buffer lighting, etc) and how I somewhat despise writing GLSL because I always just use notepad - with no syntax highlighting or anything that's nice about using a proper IDE or code editor. Then on a whim I searched for "GLSL shader editor" and GPUpad popped up. Why I never bothered to search for a proper shader editing application before is just one of life's mysteries I suppose.

Just for fun, here's some random stuff from the project I'm currently working on - a sort of wildfire RTS game written in C rendered with Vulkan that I'll be using GPUpad for the rest of the GLSL that's needed (i.e. the remaining 90%):

Got my immediate-mode UI system cooking:

Importing models from Blockbench (going for a low-poly aesthetic specifically to be able to handle millions of mesh instances):

Getting mesh instances rendering:

...and more instances:

...and more instances...

...getting tile/chunk based terrain mesh stuff cooking, and more instances:

Then I started tinkering with the perpetual-sunset/twilight aesthetic that I'm going for, just experimenting:

Returned to my hydraulic/thermal erosion prototype to get reacquainted with it for porting over to compute shader in the actual project's codebase:

After the usual requisite issues that needed to be ironed out were dealt with, got it running in the actual Vulkan project:

Each "tile" that's generated as the wildfire progresses across the "master" terrain is upscaled from its corresponding section, but with a bilinear upscale the meshes weren't super duper awesome:

...and ran into issues trying to get neighboring terrain meshes to match up properly:

Then added in some bicubic upscaling, which automatically increased the subdivision count on the static version of ROAM I'm employing for meshing tiles' heightmaps:

Now it's on to getting the deferred renderer up and running (with GPUpad no less), and then back to population-center placement, road intersection node placement, road pathfinding, and more intelligent and realistic mesh instance placement based on altitude/slope/water/roads/etc. Then it's on to actually simulating the fire across the terrain tiles, a particle system, an entity system through which the player will engage the wildfire to suppress it, and evacuate citizens in a non-traffic-jam-causing fashion. I've done dozens of projects over the last 25 years but this is the first one that I've planned almost in its entirety, and am using as an excuse to learn Vulkan (finally).

Anyway, hope that was at least somewhat enjoyable. Have a good day! :]

• Charlie

[houmain]

Thanks for giving some insight into what you are using GPUpad for. Looks great!