Hacker News: kasool

New comment by kasool in "No Graphics API"

kasool — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 07:06:21 +0000

UE5 has a fairly mature Vulkan backend but as you might guess is second class to DX12.

New comment by kasool in "No Graphics API"

kasool — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 07:03:59 +0000

Why would it be difficult? There are explicit shader semantics to specify output position.

In fact, Qualcomm's documentation spells this out: https://docs.qualcomm.com/nav/home/overview.html?product=160...

New comment by kasool in "Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits"

kasool — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 18:32:26 +0000

Hathaway honestly blew me away the first time I saw it. One of the few movies I've watched 3-4 times now. It's exactly like you say, you can really _feel_ the weight and scale of mobile suits. It's honestly a fantastic start to this new era of UC.

Also lol @ kshatriya being called bell pepper. It's probably my favorite non-gundam mobile suit. I wish they'd make an MG kit for it despite how massive it is.

New comment by kasool in "Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits"

kasool — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 18:29:41 +0000

The original 0079 and then on (Zeta, ZZ, CCA) is the strongest and best way to understand Gundam, its themes, and its legacy. I'd also argue that Unicorn is a strong entry and puts a nice cap on that era of UC but typically people don't group it with the original 4.

New comment by kasool in "Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits"

kasool — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 18:23:58 +0000

If insisting on anime-only: Zero. Otherwise the true way is the game (which is now fully available on modern platforms with translation).

New comment by kasool in "Shaders: How to draw high fidelity graphics with just x and y coordinates"

kasool — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 03:09:19 +0000

Not really! The difference is MoltenVK (and now KosmicKrisp) is officially supported and funded by Khronos itself.

DXVK, vkd3d on the other hand is propped up by dozens of passionate open-source contributors.

I'm drawing my lines not based on technicalities, but on the reality of the situation when it comes to how much the "controlling entity" of each API cares about supporting your platforms. And the fact is, Khronos has put time and money into supporting more platforms than Microsoft has.

New comment by kasool in "Shaders: How to draw high fidelity graphics with just x and y coordinates"

kasool — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 20:50:49 +0000

Yeah, I work professionally as a gpu/graphics programmer and even I have trouble sometimes wrapping my head around some of the fancy shadertoy one-liners. Most of the stuff I work with is conceptually much more simple. The math if any is all generally really straightforward and derived from a handful of commonly used algorithms or PBR models. The more common work is performance tuning and scaling across multiple architectures/platforms. You might run into this stuff more if working with SDFs though.

New comment by kasool in "Shaders: How to draw high fidelity graphics with just x and y coordinates"

kasool — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 16:42:36 +0000

Sure, that's true and a pretty valid criticism of the system.

My definition of open is that Khronos doesn't restrict (as far as I know) what platforms Vulkan can be implemented on. The same cannot be said for DX12 or Metal.

New comment by kasool in "Shaders: How to draw high fidelity graphics with just x and y coordinates"

kasool — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 16:37:11 +0000

Fair enough! In my humble opinion those specific circumstances outlined are a bit overly-pedantic for the target audience of this article and for general practical purposes. The average Windows user can reasonably expect that they'll be able to write a Vulkan application without much fuss ( until you run into the driver bugs of course ;) ).

New comment by kasool in "Shaders: How to draw high fidelity graphics with just x and y coordinates"

kasool — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 16:03:41 +0000

To elaborate on this, Vulkan is an open _standard_ whose many implementations (user mode driver) may or may not be open source. Vulkan is just a header file, it's up to the various independent hardware vendors (IHVs) to implement it for their platform.

Also a small correction: Vulkan actually _does_ run Apple platforms (via Vulkan-to-Metal translation) using MoltenVK and the new KosmicKrisp driver, and it works quite well.

New comment by kasool in "Blender 5.0"

kasool — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 07:16:28 +0000

There was a big interface rehaul for 2.80, and I suspect upcoming versions will continue to improve as interest in porting to platforms like iPad increases.

Learning the shortcuts is really the way to go though. Initially painful but 100x more productivity in the long run, and really the way Blender is meant to be used. Honestly just doing a single basic tutorial will have you learning all of them in no time.

New comment by kasool in "Blender 5.0"

kasool — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 07:04:13 +0000

Maybe obsolete in the sense of feature to price ratio (infinite in Blender's case), but Maya is still very much used for the sole reason that entire studio pipelines are likely built around it. Years of tools programmers and artist knowledge build-up don't go away just like that. Licensing costs are a drop in the bucket compared to all the other overhead. Of course that's mainly concerning big productions, there's obviously no reason hobbyists or indies should be using anything except Blender. I will say w.r.t to sculpting specifically ZBrush is still king mostly due to how its technology is fundamentally unique in its ability to easily handle huge poly counts. Blender is still not quite there in the high-fidelity regime.

I suspect in general "big companies" and the ecosystems they operate in are the main reason adoption (and subsequent investment and development) hasn't happened. The Microsoft Office suite is a good example, since many companies likely run the full Office + Teams + Outlook stack. It all "seamlessly" (not really lol) works together, and it's attractive to sell corporate solutions like that.

New comment by kasool in "Sony's Mark Cerny Has Worked on "Big Chunks of RDNA 5" with AMD"

kasool — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 01:24:29 +0000

This has long been the aspect I've struggled with, having spent some time implementing various temporal solutions in the past 2 years. We can try and pull out all sorts of classic metrics like SSIM, but the truth is a lot of these effects are really hard to objectively evaluate using some sort of metric. Moreover the same technique can have vastly different outcomes depending on the content, and user perception is subjective as well. Many days were spent thinking I had solved a visual issue, only for another edge case to come up under specific conditions. Many of these techniques are fairly difficult to reason about from first-principles and adding ML into the mix only makes that harder.

New comment by kasool in "Sony's Mark Cerny Has Worked on "Big Chunks of RDNA 5" with AMD"

kasool — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 22:31:41 +0000

Just to add to this, from a former colleague of mine who currently works as a graphics programmer at a UE5 studio: most graphics programmers are essentially tech support for artists nowadays. In an age where much of AAA is about making the biggest, most cinematic, most beautiful game, your artists and game content designers are the center of your production pipeline.

It used to be that the technology tended to drive the art. Nowadays the art drives the tech. We only need to look at all the advertised features of UE5 to see that. Nanite allows artists to spend less time tweaking LODs and optimizing meshes as well as flattening the cost of small triangle rendering. Lumen gives us realtime global illumination everywhere so artists don’t have to spend a million hours baking multiple light maps. Megalights lifts restrictions on the number of dynamic lights and shadows a lighting artist can place in the scene. The new Nanite foliage shown off in the Witcher 4 allows foliage artists to go ham with modeling their trees

New comment by kasool in "Unreal 5.5 is a big deal [video]"

kasool — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 21:41:10 +0000

It's not just you. There's a real problem right now with the push towards graphical fidelity (specifically "realism") coming at cost to readability -- most of which is informed by careful choices in the game's art (lighting, level design, style, etc.)

The main example I can think of is the "yellow paint" discourse w.r.t to games like Resident Evil 4 remake Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. Freya Holmer has a really great thread on the latter: https://x.com/FreyaHolmer/status/1756276112462627119

To be clear, I don't think the push towards realism is at odds with having a stylish and readable game. But the more dimensions you're dealing with (greater complexity in lighting models, materials etc.) the more difficult it gets to tie everything together into something cohesive.

New comment by kasool in "Unreal 5.5 is a big deal [video]"

kasool — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 21:31:26 +0000

Unity is not dying lol. Unreal is only becoming the "Chrome of the game engine world" in the AAA space. It's not a nice tool to use for independent projects at all, speaking as someone who works with it professionally. Most aspects of what makes Unity great for Indies are missing from Unreal (good docs is the big one).

New comment by kasool in "Let's Write a Malloc (2014)"

kasool — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 02:57:17 +0000

Not sure how that changes anything lol. The point still stands that the original comment is needlessly rude.

New comment by kasool in "Show HN: A Japanese learning app focused on efficient vocab/grammar acquisition"

kasool — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 16:36:09 +0000

Hi, I’ve been using the app for a few days and I’m really enjoying it! Until recently I was using WaniKani, which I still enjoy, but I’ve been intimidated on how to start learning real grammar and conversation. Would enjoy a web or Mac version as some others may have pointed out.

New comment by kasool in "Coding and drawing"

kasool — Wed, 19 Aug 2020 20:00:06 +0000

Yes, this is also what I learned in my drawing studio. Our brains already have a preconception of what, for example, a human face looks like: Eyes, nose, ears, mouth. We think this way because it allows us to quickly recognize what distinguishes a human face from a chair.

But really, as you said, drawing is about SLOWING DOWN and noticing the parts that make up the eyes, nose, ears, mouth. In my own drawing education I've found that the description I'd give of drawing is the "study of shapes", not symbols.

New comment by kasool in "Coding and drawing"

kasool — Wed, 19 Aug 2020 19:56:38 +0000

I agree with the difference you describe. A lot of people who are "naturally gifted" at drawing just have an intuitive sense of what is right, and just are able to draw without thinking too hard. When master artists are sketching the layout of their scene, they're not necessarily explicitly thinking about vanishing points and perspective. With practice, this stuff becomes completely intuitive. Unfortunately this often means that the best drawers are not necessarily the best teachers : )

For the record though, I think pretty much anyone can learn to draw "well".