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.

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.

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.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40622209

https://www.gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scrat...