iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

An interesting thing that distorts the online discourse on AI in software engineering: A lot of SWEs think (sadly accurately right now) that they will be unemployable if they express any view other than optimism and excitement for AI progress.

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Migrating hordes of Creepy Capsules work to build a tower of their own bodies... who knows their motivations. (This started as a physics test and was pretty entertaining.)

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Playing with the probe/tunneling tool to make it more visually interesting - the tunnel wobbles while the probe is active and then "fuses" when you use it

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Reposted by Mike Turitzin

Terence Tao @teorth.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

A group of 25 Fields Medalists, including myself, have made a joint declaration on Math and AI: mathandai.org . We welcome additional signatories. See also this article in the Economist announcing the declaration: www.economist.com/science-and-...

mathandai.org

Declaration — Math and AI

Read the declaration and add your name.

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Playing with higher explosion knock-back forces :)

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Another benefit of SDF edit lists: Rewind changes! (because every edit is non-destructive) I'm doing this right now at the end of enemy waves for game balance reasons, but I'll likely play with letting them pile up in some scenarios.

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Boring into metal using a special tool.

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

One thing I learned from this article is that (on NVIDIA GPUs) 128-byte cache lines are divided into 4 32-byte sectors, which are read independently. So there's a benefit to reducing random-access reads below the cache-line size, but not below 32 bytes. blog.doubleword.ai/what-happens...

blog.doubleword.ai

What happens when a GPU reads memory | Doubleword

Following an LDG.E SASS instruction through the hardware units in an RTX 4090.

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Immediate mode GUI (I use @ocornut.bsky.social's Dear ImGui) and C++ hot-reload is an extremely powerful combination. Live-coding of UI is like building a Shadertoy - fast visual feedback gets you into a flow state. I've been using ImGui's "background draw list" functionality (which

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Making more progress on enemy waves and base defense in my game. (It uses a roguelike structure combining mining and base defense, with destruction / world modification as a big aspect of both.)

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

The new version of Enshrouded has replaced triangle meshes with SDF bricks for terrain 👀 youtu.be/4AQycxtpPno?...

youtu.be

Enshrouded - Performance Improvements for 1.0

YouTube video by Enshrouded

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

A nice little rendering breakdown of Animal Well, stepping through a frame with RenderDoc. I love all the zany things that are done in 2D games, and this one is particularly creative. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Htal...

youtube.com

How is this frame of Animal Well rendered?

YouTube video by FibbWare

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Tried iq's biplanar mapping, which is a cool technique (2 rather than 3 triplanar samples), but ran into issues for regular geometry like a capsule. There's a singularity where the 3 triplanar weights are equal that extends along the capsule's length in some orientations. 1/

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

It's easy to forget how 'discard' in a fragment shader interacts with automatically-calculated screenspace derivatives (and their use in mip selection for texture sampling). If you don't handle it correctly, you'll see seams at the discard/no-discard boundary. 1/

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Just implemented instant flipping between the current and previous shaders (PSOs) after a hot-reload. This is really simple to implement - just hold onto the previous PSOs after hot-reload, and then add a shortcut to flip between new and old, which is instant! 1/

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Great idea! I am 100% going to do this very soon.

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Followed my own advice to do the simplest/dumbest implementation, and just (finally) got shader hot-reloading working. Rather than watching files for changes, tracking dependencies between them, etc., I just implemented a ctrl+R shortcut that reloads ALL shader pipelines ... 1/

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

A couple shots from the video I posted yesterday, as the low video (re)encoding bitrate completely nuked most of the texture detail

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

At long last, SDF material textures are supported in my engine! I've decided to go for a textural and slightly hand-painted look. Currently using color and normal maps, might consider roughness as well. 1/

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Another useful property of convex shapes: A "convex combination" of the vertices of a convex shape (vertex weights that are non-negative and sum to 1) yields a point inside the shape. Barycentric coordinates of triangles are a specific example of this.

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

9/10 Reddit users agree - barycentric coordinates are useful. Thanks AI!

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Taking advantage of Jolt Physics's ability to "cook" its internal binary format to speed up startup times in Debug builds a ton. It was taking a long time to generate SDF collision mesh chunks on startup for Debug builds in particular. I'd prefer not to have to cache this data,

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

I'm surprised at how often following the thought experiment of "what is the simplest and dumbest way I could solve this problem" saves a ton of work. AI-assisted coding discourages thinking this way, but I think that can be a trap, as code is still a liability.

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

A cool thing about handling materials via palettes in this way is that you need only "pay for what you use" in terms of material complexity. So in the common case of a brick that uses only 1 material, no material weights need be cached at all! [cont]

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

A laser to fire while defending the base. Surely no inappropriate pictures will be drawn using this laser. Surely.

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Just used De Morgan's law to merge ANDs and ORs of multiple bit-flags into a single atomic-OR. a & b == ~(~a | ~b) So NOT the bits you want to AND, then atomic-OR, then NOT the result. The OR'd bits obviously work with no changes. (Could also do this with atomic-AND.)

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

The NPR Tiny Desk concert we have been waiting for www.youtube.com/watch?v=e81L...

youtube.com

Napalm Death: Tiny Desk Concert

YouTube video by NPR Music

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

The constant focus on "productivity" (and "output") lately is driving me a little insane. What's the end result you're trying to achieve? (and why is that worthwhile?) What results show you're getting there more quickly?

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

I'm close to finishing a major rework of how materials are baked in my engine. Rather than baking material properties directly, I now store a material palette per brick and bake blend weights. This means that material property blending is "deferred" to render-time, ... 1/

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

I've seen significant differences in shader execution times several times recently from just reordering code blocks (this is obviously non-dependent code). This is on NVIDIA hardware. Interesting to see, I suspect it has to do with hiding read latency with ALU work, but would ..

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Trying out a couple new 3D->1D hash functions for my terrain generation RNG, inspired by this paper: jcgt.org/published/00... The possibility of losing my now-fondly-familiar default seed terrain makes me a bit sad though 🥲

jcgt.org

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Reposted by Mike Turitzin

ceruleite.bsky.social @ceruleite.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

2026 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course line up is here - check it out! advances.realtimerendering.com

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Something that just clicked for me - In the same way that dividing by distance-to-origin (L2 norm) projects a point onto the unit circle/sphere: Dividing by L1 norm projects onto the unit diamond/octahedron Dividing by L-infinity norm projects onto the unit square/cube cont.

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Reposted by Mike Turitzin

mmalex @mmalex.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

my #1 grizzly beard protip for (game) dev is: if you have a bug that you dont understand the cause of immediately, dont try to fix it; add & iterate visualization / inspection tools until the cause is plain to see. the accumulation of 'observability' in your system's state will pay off many times

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Just got a major SDF ray-marching perf improvement based on a simple tweak: increase the minimum step size above the epsilon required to stop marching. This seems to work really well with my setup. Doesn't have the downside of visibly "bloating" silhouette edges (which ... 1/

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Because ray-marching SDF bricks is so comparatively expensive, with two-pass occlusion culling I'm generally rendering frames faster the more other stuff I add. (Disoccluded bricks are drawn in magenta.)

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Kind of obvious when you think about it, but it was cool to realize that I don't need to record position history to draw artillery trails, as the same closed-form trajectory equation can be used to "rewind time" for each shot to generate its trail positions.

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

I'm not using it every day depending on what I'm doing, but man, hot-reload of C++ (using Live++) is a life-saver for gameplay iteration. I remember back when I was building my VR app, I would not only have to close/compile/run but also often take the headset off and on. Oof.

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

The depth and thoroughness of @bgolus.bsky.social articles, when you are blessed with one relevant to what you're currently doing. (In this case, using normal maps with triplanar texture mapping.) bgolus.medium.com/normal-mappi...

bgolus.medium.com

Normal Mapping for a Triplanar Shader

Triplanar mapping is a great solution for dealing with texturing on complex geometry that is difficult or impossible to use traditional UVs…

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

If you graph the representable floating point values on the 2D plane, you get something that looks like clipmaps/cascades. Therefore floating point representations are LODs for real numbers🤔 (also shows why floating point for absolute positions is bad)

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Dawn/Chrome now supports WebGPU "immediates" (aka. push constants). Curious of the perf impact vs. per-draw uniform buffer bindings via dynamic offsets. (Haven't used push constants in other APIs.) Bindless would/will also make this a lot more useful. developer.chrome.com/blog/new-in-...

developer.chrome.com

What's New in WebGPU (Chrome 149-150) | Blog | Chrome for Developers

Immediates and stricter validation for transient attachments.

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

This is a clever use of 32-bit atomics for depth+color rasterization output that I hadn't thought of. (I hadn't read the FreePipe paper; this summary is from @m-schuetz.bsky.social's recent CuRast paper: github.com/m-schuetz/Cu... )

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Really love this project and article - a handmade early-mid-90s-ish FPS. The procedural pixel art "gibbing" and particle effects are pretty cool, among other stuff staniks.github.io/articles/cat...

staniks.github.io

Catlantean 3D - Making Graphics Like It's 1993

A deep dive into the asset creation pipeline for Catlantean 3D.

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Playing with my dolls in the Jolt Physics samples

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Experimenting with having enemies turn to full rigid bodies when damaged and then recover after bouncing around. It's pretty entertaining how they pop back up.

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Now that I am rendering meshes that need to cast shadows (sorry SDF purists!!), I had to update the world-space caching scheme I use for sun shadows. The SDF shadows are cached in tiles and incrementally redrawn as geometry changes. This is very cheap, which is ... 1/

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Attack of the capsules! They are considerably more menacing than I was expecting, especially from inside the dome.

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Interesting new SDF-related paper just dropped: "Dual Contouring of Signed Distance Data" (SIGGRAPH 2026) gatc.cs.columbia.edu/projects/dua...

gatc.cs.columbia.edu

Dual Contouring of Signed Distance Data

Dual Contouring of Signed Distance Data project page.

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Mike Turitzin @miketuritzin.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

I get a little dopamine hit when I use a feature of rendering APIs that I haven't used before. Just used viewport depth-range for the first time (not just the default [0,1]) as a way of rendering to a cached shadow map, but with the far plane pulled in for additional culling. ..

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