iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Auri

@aurail.us

♀️ she/her 🖥️ game dev 🌐 aurailus.com Through a series of confusing and unusual events, I'm now the director of an indie game studio, @effortgames.ca!~ Also making Zepha, a super-fast moddable voxel engine! Profile & Banner by @zythia.art

Posts Replies Media

Auri @aurail.us · 24/02/2025

@franekk.bsky.social ever since I first saw em I've been enamored by your watercolor trees. I made my own and I think it turned out alright. I'd love to know if you have any tips or tricks!

250

Auri @aurail.us · 26/08/2023

@nifflas.bsky.social I created my own unreadable font, inspired by the one you were posting awhile back! It's definitely a lot less cryptic than yours, but it serves its purpose of preventing passers-by from reading over my shoulder. I can read it fluently, & have it system-wide on all my devices :)

A recent Nifflas tweet in my own font, designed to be unreadable.

260

Auri @aurail.us · 24/07/2023

It's been a long-term plan to have feasibly infinite render distance in Zepha, a goal that I've been making a lot of progress towards recently. Here is a 2.5 km region rendered in real-time that is running at almost perfect framerate, before all of the optimizations I have planned are complete.

121

Auri @aurail.us · 22/07/2023

To make things performant, I had to delve deep into micro-optimizations like Word Level Parallelism, which is a technique to do the same operation on multiple numbers packed into a single integer. The algorithm supports a huge dynamic range for colors and brightnesses, and operates in real time.

121

Auri @aurail.us · 22/07/2023

To accomplish this, I split the lighting into 6 channels. RGB for block light, and RGB for sky light. (technically there's 9 channels but that's too complicated to get into right now). I also store the direction that light comes from so that I can build a pseudo-sphere of light around the source.

121

Auri @aurail.us · 22/07/2023

One thing that was really important to me when designing my game's lighting was that I wanted the static lighting to fit in with more fancy graphical effects. That means that Minecraft's lackluster diamond-shaped lighting wasn't going to cut it. I wanted spherical light and I wanted colors!

131

Auri @aurail.us · 22/07/2023

Hi, I'm Auri and I'm ~~reinventing the wheel~~ making a voxel game / engine. Recently I've managed to scrape together a really cool RGB voxel lighting algorithm so I'm going to make a thread about it!

272