Finding your home in game graphics programming

The suggested site https://LearningOpenGl.com is great and I've seen similar websites for Vulkan and WebGPU.

I also recommend grabbing the suggested book, Real Time Rendering, along. I've found it to be great learning material, having a well detailed chapter dedicated for all the effects used in modern renderers. Works great as a reference though it doesn't have any code samples. Doesn't concern itself too much about API details. In my learning flow, I go through a chapter and try to implement one of the techniques mentioned for the effect; usually referencing one of these web resources.

Vulkan is terrible to get started with. It's not so much a learning curve as a learning electric fence.

DirectX11 was a remarkably friendly API to learn.

I wrote a game engine once over a 5 year period and used it for exactly one project[0] before acknowledging just how complicated it would be to maintain, given the progress of other engines. I was constantly reading papers for new techniques, trying to decide if they were feasible, while trying to navigate the ancient-to-modern spread of OpenGL documentation and tutorials.

In the end I'm pretty proud of what I came up with. I had blender integration so blender could be used to design my scenes, animations, etc, and exported via my custom engine format. I had a lua-based scripting language to design things that were dynamic at runtime. And I had a bunch of cool (to me) shaders, like depth of field, gaussian blur, and glow. I had some advanced techniques like light probes[1] that I (kind of) open sourced.

The end result of what I wanted to accomplish though (a project) was different from what I was spending most of my time working on (the engine), so I had to call it quits eventually. It was an excellent learning experience though, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn graphics from the ground up.

0. https://www.arwmoffat.com/work/normal-distribution 1. https://github.com/amoffat/blender-lightprobes/blob/master/_...

yeah, I heard about this site. But I need a book about software 3d rendering. I want to build something very simple but without any apis and libraries such as opengl or directx. And Real-Time Rendering 4th chapter is seems like what I need.

The most fun I had with (2D) graphics programming was trying to reinvent the whole wheel myself in a high-level language (C# in this case). My approach was to simply output bitmap images, subsequently compressed into jpeg by way of libjpegturbo, at a high enough framerate to produce a believable result in a web browser, other clients, or even as input into ffmpeg.

To my surprise, I was able to get a fairly stable 60fps@1080p (in chrome) using this approach. Not 1 line of GPU-accelerated "magic" required. Now, this is just a blank image sent to the client view each time. The "fun" part was figuring out how to draw lines, text, etc. without absolutely crippling the performance. I got far enough to determine that a useful business system/UI framework could hypothetically be constructed in this way. Certainly, a little too constrained for AAA 3D gaming, but there are many genres that could fit a smaller perf budget. Controlling the entire code pile is an extremely compelling angle for me and the products I work on.

I could have started with D3D, Vulkan, et. al., but I can guarantee I would not have spent as much time or learned as much down those paths. I have already spent countless hours screwing with these APIs (mostly D3D/OpenGL) over my career, only to end up with a pile of frustrating garbage because I couldn't be bothered to follow all the rules exactly the way they wanted me to. I personally view the current state of graphics APIs and hardware as extremely regrettable and "in the way".

To me, a modern graphics card and its associated proprietary functionality stack is like the most recent Katy Freeway (I-10) expansion in Houston. A totally hopeless attempt at solving a much deeper and more difficult question (i.e. traffic or how to create fun/useful visual experiences).