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Tomasz Stachowiak

@h3r2tic.bsky.social

3.9K followers 120 following 63 posts

Washed-up renderologist working on #TinyGlade with @anopara.bsky.social; ½ of Pounce Light, ½ making sense ½ the time; he/him; 🦀

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Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Dec 5

Hey, y'all! 👋 I'm Tom (or Tomasz if you enjoy Hungarian Notation or Klingon)

I cause graphics devices to become lost, and generate all sorts of technical, design & artistic debt in Tiny Glade, together with @anopara.bsky.social, @lydmartin.bsky.social & @odaodaoda.bsky.social

A screenshot of the video game Tiny Glade, showing two cozy cottages on an elevated stone foundation, surrounded by water, in an autumn setting.

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Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Jul 30

There's a Mac section in the Steam post 👀

Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Mar 14

Yas, it's rather easy:
partner.steamgames.com/doc/api/ISte...

ISteamUtils Interface (Steamworks Documentation)

partner.steamgames.com

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Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Mar 14

As long as it's not Intel (U)HD Graphics, it should still run decently well, especially with the new upscaling :)

Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Mar 14

Aaaaalmost full - our GPU selection / driver warning screen doesn't support controller input yet

Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Mar 14

Do you mean other devs? Tiny Glade has been Linux-native from the start :)

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Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Mar 13

Thank you :3

a kitten is standing on a bed with a 4gifs.com watermark

ALT: a kitten is standing on a bed with a 4gifs.com watermark

media.tenor.com

Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Mar 13

Thanks, maaan :D
*dances around*

(That's some crazy company to be in xD)

Reposted by Tomasz Stachowiak

Tiny Glade 🏰🌿 @pouncelight.bsky.social · Mar 13

This is pretty insane 😳😳

BAFTA Games @baftagames.bsky.social · Mar 4

The nominees for Technical Achievement are…

ASTRO BOT
BLACK MYTH: WUKONG
CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS 6
SENUA’S SAGA: HELLBLADE II
TINY GLADE
WARHAMMER 40,000: SPACE MARINE 2

#BAFTAGamesAwards

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Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Dec 17

One of the benefits of a microscopic team, but also kind of a necessity; maybe the real thing would actually work better if we poured more time into it, but we can't quite afford the time to find out ^^; In the end we still piggy-back on the research done by grown-ups to pull off our silly hacks xD

Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Dec 16

Yes, but poorly xD
bsky.app/profile/h3r2...

Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Dec 5

In our next Tiny Glade update we'll bump the light limit from 32 to 32k while keeping the cost more or less the same.

The small limit has been a cop out, as we didn't quite know how to render huge numbers of (screen-space) shadow-casting lights without severe performance degradation.

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Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Dec 16

And this right here is why ye olde tiled lighting would never fly in Tiny Glade :D

(build by Omayli)

Tiny Glade 🏰🌿 @pouncelight.bsky.social · Dec 16

Hey, y'all! Hope you're well and feeling festive ⛄ We've just released a winter update for Tiny Glade, lifting the light count limit and adding the ability to move clutter 🧵

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Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Dec 9

Cause the contribution weight contains noise that you multiply into the otherwise potentially noise-free radiance (noise-free if you manage to discover all the lights to evaluate)

Reposted by Tomasz Stachowiak

Mikkel Gjoel @gjoel.bsky.social · Dec 7

Finally online, the brilliant talk Pondering Orbs by Mikkel Svendsen on the rendering of the similarly brilliant game Cocoon youtu.be/8kS17jt38XQ?...

Pondering Orbs: The Rendering and Art Tools of COCOON

YouTube video by Graphics Programming Conference

youtu.be

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Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Dec 8

Oh, and thank you for the kind words <3

Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Dec 8

Hah, well, falling back to ray tracing would likely be great, but even if the potato geometry was sufficient, we likely couldn't afford it. But hey, there's probably use cases where that's juuust fine :)

Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Dec 8

I've used a lot of ReSTIR before in my toy rendering engine - which I'd made specifically to mess around with global illumination algorithms.

It's all about trying a bunch of techniques (for many years), and then mixing & matching in strange new ways.

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Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Dec 8

Glad you found the content density to your liking :D

We'll see, I would need to get a HDR monitor first xD I've been eyeballing some for a while, so it's plausible.

Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Dec 8

I'll get on that Infected Mushroom licensing deal right away.

Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Dec 8

Nope, I've had enough clicking :P Have this instead.

It's a bit broken of course; needs a denoiser, and likely a shadow cache, as screen-space stuff breaks apart at this scale.

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Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Dec 8

Thanks dude :) Glad to hear that the game works like hypnotoad for rendering folks too xD

My guess is that we'll keep evolving the renderer to cope with the kinda craziness that players throw at it :D (assuming the game remains popular) Should be fun!

Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Dec 8

The probabilities of the losing lights are used in the math, so that the expected value is the mean of all the lights, not just the chosen ones. Standard importance sampling stuff, with picking from a PMF, only realized in a streaming fashion via reservoir sampling.

Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Dec 8

Indeed :) It's about designing the failure mode, and for UGC stuff, bias (or even noise) is possibly better than terrible performance, tile-shaped artifacts, or harsh limits.

I'm can't wait to see what kinda trickery you come up with for HypeHype! :)

Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Dec 6

Thank you! I think it might be one of the benefits of hyper-specializing tech for our game. This would likely be way trickier for the devs of a larger engine to pull off ^^;

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Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Dec 6

:D
"Ummm yeah, can you elaborate a bit on slides 50 to 130?"

Tomasz Stachowiak @h3r2tic.bsky.social · Dec 6

(But I've also just realized that there's 16 spare bits in each reservoir, which could be used to encode depth, and cheaply reject poorly fitting reservoirs, reducing the bias)