I don’t often post outside AnKi’s website but here’s a new blog post explaining how Vulkan barriers work at the hardware and driver level on Mali GPUs developer.arm.com/community/ar...
About that collision layering system I mentioned earlier:
I had a hard time remembering which collision layer was what, so I took it a step further.
While the engine still handles layers agnostically, I added a simple .ini file to name them.
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Prototyping some rough interactions today. It’s super basic stuff, but when you see it working in an engine you built from scratch, it just hits differently.
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Few people will get it, but I actually enjoy a bright theme once in a while. Blame it on growing up with Windows 98 & XP.
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A complete coincidence. The funny thing is that the entity was tagged "possessed" for an earlier experiment... Oops.
Added editor actions history to my custom engine. The standard Undo/Redo safety net. Something I should have done ages ago. It makes such a huge difference in the level editor. Now let's make some maps.
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Thanks! Hopefully I can find the time to turn this into an actual game this year.
Post-processing doing a lot of the heavy lifting here.
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Added game pause support in Detis Engine.
Tip: If you are building your own engine and want pausing, implement it as early as possible. It’s one of those systems that can touch everything, physics, animations, timers, input...
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It's running 50fps on a decade old 1070, so never say never!
Thank you! 🙏 I appreciate the kind words and great to hear you are following the journey.
So the switch was mostly about maintaining my flow, without the engine getting in the way.
How Detis defers. Generic engines try to do everything all at once, for everyone. I built my tech specifically for my own tastes, needs, and workflow. By removing the layers I don't need, I’ve significantly reduced development time for my own projects. Almost by half.
At some point, I made a bet with myself. To consistently use a couple of hours a day to build something functional within a year. And somehow I made it.
That had to do with my own specific needs though.
Tbh, initially, and after having spent more than 6 years using AngelScript for my day job at the time, I started my engine with the idea to build something small just to refresh my C++ a bit. And it kept growing and growing.
Now, the switch happened mostly because I found myself digging into the source & shaders a little bit too often. I hit a point where the time I was investing in tweaking, or extending things to suit certain needs wasn't justifying the time I was supposedly saving by using a pre-built engine.
Big discussion! 😅
I should first say that Godot is easily the best general-purpose engine I've used over the years. Near zero iteration times between gameplay changes and that by its own is huge. Imho, UE5 and Unity are a horrible mess in comparison at their very best.
One thing I really liked about the Godot engine before I switched to my own tech, was how it handles collision groups and masking. It’s simple, intuitive, and just works. So I ended up replicating that logic in the Detis engine.
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Radial Blur in my custom game engine.
This was a relatively hard one to get right, especially on the performance side. My second favorite camera effect after "Vertigo".
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Adding camera effects to my custom game engine.
My favorite so far.
The Hitchcock & Roberts "Vertigo" effect.
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Added vertex color texture blending support to my custom game engine. It's using vertex color RGB channels to blend between 4 texture arrays.
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Exactly. It’s a combination of SSAO, spot lights, and smoothed shadow edges. People have kind of forgotten these old techniques these days. They aren't physically accurate, but they work really well and offer way more artistic control than fighting a GI solver.
Thank you! No lightmapping or GI yet. Perhaps v2.0 if I get there in the future. Interior lighting is all done by placing lights manually at the moment. I've found that a few well-placed fill lights can get you 90% of the way there without the performance cost or the implementation headache.
Improving world loading times for my custom game engine today. fastgltf is proving to be a serious ally.
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Investigating potential upgrades for my custom game engine's post-processing chain.
I’ve started by replacing the old threshold-based Bloom with a physically based downsample/upsample approach.
Source: lnkd.in/d6FGE9uW
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How it Started vs. How it’s Going 2025
I built a custom C++/OpenGL 3D game engine and editor from scratch in less than a year, and just ~2h average a day. Now, let's see how far I can push it with a small proof-of-concept game next.
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I realized I hadn't really tested the engine's interior lighting capabilities yet, so I threw some boxes together for a quick test. No shadows from point lights yet, and no GI of any sort, but still pretty decent results.
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😆
Hey Robin, thank you! 🙏
Yes, project has always revolved around a short game I have in mind. Went like, "What do I want to build, what tools do I need, and how can this significantly speed up my workflow compared to a generic engine? But yeah, it's a free-time project so my goals are very loose.
I haven't been posting much, but after about 10 months, the goal is nearly achieved. I now have a proper game engine and toolset! I'm shifting my focus to the fun part. Making that small proof of concept game I had in mind. Time to put the tech to the test! #gamedev
