J. Kyle Pittman

An exmaple of Z-fighting: a red rectangle and a cyan rectangle are drawn at nearly the same depth, leading to flickering artifacts where one or the other is drawn to the screen. By Mhoskins at en.wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by User:JohnnyMrNinja using CommonsHelper., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4435257

When triangles are drawn at nearly the exact same depth and the precision of the depth buffer is insufficient to distinguish between them, making them flicker as the view changes. (Image from Wikipedia)

the sowing/reaping tweet but it's me writing a terrain renderer and then realizing i need a better depth buffer strategy to address z-fighting

Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, Dark Souls II, Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, Dark Souls III, Elden Ring, Bloodborne, Demon's Souls (2020), Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

Selfie in front of the movie poster for The Bride! at Alamo Drafthouse

It is time!

Project Atlas // 2026 03 04 21 25 54 YouTube video by J. Kyle Pittman

Got LODs blending out with height as well as 2D distance.

This is a little chuggy when flying around fast on account of generating all the height data in real time, but once I move to static heightmaps it should be much faster.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVrk...

Project Atlas // 2026 03 04 21 25 54 YouTube video by J. Kyle Pittman

Got LODs blending out with height as well as 2D distance.

This is a little chuggy when flying around fast on account of generating all the height data in real time, but once I move to static heightmaps it should be much faster.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVrk...

hey bluesky hey bluesky hey

what’s a jawa’s favorite pasta shape

Forcing myself to take a break from this terrain thingy and play some ARC Raiders tonight.

what if it happened while bluesky was down

👀

If you can believe it, it's another 3D render of black and white terrain with a big old mountain on the left, everything is always framed to the left third of the screen, gotta nail that golden ratio, art happens when the FOV is small and the lens is long and the ratio is golden and the environment is framed from a low angle with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio matted against a 16:9 backdrop.

If you can believe it, it's another 3D render of black and white terrain with a big old mountain on the left, everything is always framed to the left third of the screen, gotta nail that golden ratio, art happens when the FOV is small and the lens is long and the ratio is golden and the environment is framed from a low angle with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio matted against a 16:9 backdrop.

A 3D render of black and white terrain with a distant mountain on the right and nearer hills on the left framed from a low angle with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio matted against a 16:9 backdrop.

A 3D render of black and white terrain with a mountain rough in a shallow V shape framed from a low angle with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio matted against a 16:9 backdrop.

A 3D render of black and white terrain with a tall peak on the left side framed from a low angle with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio matted against a 16:9 backdrop.

A 3D render of black and white terrain with layers of mountains framed from a low angle with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio matted against a 16:9 backdrop.

Project Atlas // 2026 03 02 22 53 14 YouTube video by J. Kyle Pittman

It took longer than I expected, but I got blending between transitions smoothed out. Here's how it looks at full resolution: www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7wh...

Project Atlas // 2026 03 02 22 25 10 YouTube video by J. Kyle Pittman

lol this rules

i feel like an actual video game programmer or something

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vP-...

Project Atlas // 2026 03 02 07 53 14 YouTube video by J. Kyle Pittman

First pass of blending between levels of detail. The blend alpha is quantized to the grid right now but I'll smooth that out on the GPU later. Also whenever I finally get around to box filtering the LOD heightmaps, there will be fewer sharp peaks in the distance.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xg...

Project Atlas - March 1, 2026 YouTube video by J. Kyle Pittman

And here's how it looks in motion: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLX6...

Another 3D render of a black and white heightmapped terrain, this time without gaps between the levels of detail.

Finally fixed up the gaps between levels of detail. Still need to add some blending to make the transitions less obvious.

A 3D render of black and white heightmapped terrain extending to the horizon.

Updating only the parts of the height map that have changed is a huge perf improvement. I could move the texture update to the GPU, but it's already fast enough even at resolutions I'll never realistically need.

A simple 3D render of a black and white terrain heightfield.

Vertex heights are now assigned in the vertex shader from the same texture that is point-filtered across the surface of the mesh.

This is slow; I haven't yet removed the code to put the height data into a unique vertex buffer per LOD level. Next step is to go back to having only one vertex buffer.

Next step is to move the height data to a texture on the GPU, but my HLSL-to-GLSL converter has never needed to handle vertex textures before, and even though this is working on both APIs on my machine, I have zero confidence it would work on anyone else's machine because OpenGL

A simple 3D rendering of black and white mountains, with higher points drawn in brighter values and lower points drawn in darker values.

A top-down view of the same terrain from very high up, revealing every level of detail as concentric rings with higher precision near the center and lower precision near the edges.

It is prohibitively expensive to generate the height data in real time on the CPU, but I have infinite terrain working now. Also converted the square rings to circles so the distance to the next level of detail is more consistent across all angles. Still no filtering or gap fixups.

A 3D view of concentric circle waves drawn in black and white.

Proving up automated height values at any point in space with concentric waves. I'll need to repair the artifacts between terrain chunks and box filter the height values with each successive mip.

A simple 3D application showing six progressively larger square rings of the same flat piece of terrain extending to the horizon.

I'm not yet filling them with height data in real time, but I have an arbitrary number of terrain rings of any power of two resolution oriented about the camera position, with transforms and index buffers selected dynamically to keep everything contiguous.

ah i’m being told time is linear

i should replay village before requiem comes out

Ugh, YouTube added some garbage "Most Relevant" bar to the top of the subscriptions page with no way to hide or remove. Nobody wants this. Nobody asked for this. I just want to see, a chronological listing, of the latest videos, from the channels, I have voluntarily chosen, to subscribe to. Come on.

Find "but whatever" Matching lines: 56 Matching files: 44 Total files searched: 812

hey bluesky hey bluesky hey

if i search my game engine for the phrase "but whatever"

how many times do you think it will show up