alt Hacker NewsLearn computer graphics from scratch and for free
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This is gold people.
My username on here is after my (now older) game engine Reactor 3D.
I taught myself this stuff back when Quake 3 took over my high school. Doom got me into computers but Quake 3 got me into 3D. I didn’t quite understand the math in the books I bought but copied the code anyway.
Fast forward into my career and it’s been a pleasant blend of web and graphics. Now that WebGL/WebGPU is widely available. I taught PhD’s how to vertex pack and align and how to send structs to the GPU at my day job. I regret not continuing my studies and getting a PhD but I ended up writing Reactor 3D part time for XNA on Xbox 360 and then rewriting it half a decade later to be pure OpenGL. I still struggle with the advanced concepts but luckily there are others out there.
Fun fact, I worked with the guy who wrote XNA Silverlight, which would eventually be used as the basis for MonoGame, so I’m like MonoGame’s great grand uncle half removed or something. However,
Now that we have different ways of doing things, it demands a different kind of engine. So the Vulkan/Dx12/Metal way is the new jam.
This looks great, will have to check it out. I've always been interested in computer graphics, I even wrote a ray tracer when studying for my master. It was based on the, then, brand new book "An Introduction to Ray Tracing" by Andrew S. Glassner et al. The book is now free to download: https://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/an-introduction-to-ra...
I maintain (not much anymore) a list of free resources for graphics programming that some of you might find helpful. https://gist.github.com/notnotrobby/ceef71527b4f15869133ba7b...
Graphics have been a blind spot for me for pretty much my entire career. I more or less failed upward into where I am now (which ended up being a lot of data and distributed stuff). I do enjoy doing what I do and I think I'm reasonably good at it so it's hardly a "bad" thing, but I (like I think a lot of people here) got into programming because I wanted to make games.
Outside of playing with OpenGL as a teenager to make a planet orbit around a sun, a bad space invaders clone in Flash where you shoot a bird pooping on you, a really crappy Breakout clone with Racket, and the occasional experiments with Vulkan and Metal, I never really have fulfilled the dream of being the next John Carmack or Tim Sweeney.
Every time I try and learn Vulkan I end up getting confused and annoyed about how much code I need to write and give up. I suspect it's because I don't really understand the fundamentals well enough, and as a result jumping into Vulkan I end up metaphorically "drinking from a firehose". I certainly hope this doesn't happen, but if I manage to become unemployed again maybe that could be a good excuse to finally buckle down and try and learn this.
I really enjoy the website content and appreciate the hard work to create it. Also, thank you to the author for taking action on the HN feedback last year about the AI thumbnails that used to be all over this site. [0]
One of my goals this year is to write a basic software 3D renderer from first principles. No game engine, no GPU. I'm looking forward to it.
You can now post a link of a website into an LLM and turn it into an interactive resource. I did this but with a 1000 page PDF today to help me learn more about game engines. Best way to do it if you don't want it to become another PDF / bookmark that is forgotten.
Just in case NVidia stops having a monopoly of graphics APIs, and Google on the web, and AMD as the alternative that sucks and isn't maintained.
The website has come a long way, a good reminder for Santa to drop a donation.
Computer graphics needs more open education for sure. Traditional techniques are sealed in old books you have to go out of your way and find; Sergei Savchenko's "3D Graphics Programming Games and Beyond" is a good one. New techniques are often behind proprietary gates, with shallow papers and slides that only give a hint of how things may work. Graphics APIs, especially modern ones, make things more confusing than they need to be too. I think writing software rasterizers and ray tracers is a good starting point; forget GPUs exist.
Also, slight tangent, but there doesn't seem to be any contact method here other than Discord, which I find to be an immediate turn-off. Last time I checked, it required a phone number.
The donations page could use a link directly from the homepage too.