Light on Glass: Why do you start making a game engine?

Post by aappleby » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 4:51 PM UTC

I get the overwhelming feeling that the author was convinced by an AI that he had a good idea without ever contacting an actual graphics programmer.

"Retro Game Engine owns the full frame lifecycle." - This is completely meaningless. Your engine controls whatever data is in the buffer that's sent to scanout, but the operating system and the GPU drivers and the scanout hardware in the GPU and the input processing and row/column drivers in the display control everything else.

The only actual screenshots this guy has are some "multiply the image with the subpixel mask" demos that.... don't look anything like a real CRT, and certainly nowhere near modern CRT shaders like CRT Royale.

The rest of the posts in the substack page are similarly devoid of actual content, but very heavy on the AI woo-woo this-is-important-and-deep stylings that I've come to find nauseating.

Hey Author, if you can see this - You're clearly a smart guy, but you need a basic grounding in 3D rendering if you're gonna do weird stuff - more than an AI can give you. In particular, the phrase "Light is linear" will be useful to you. Good luck.

Post by nazgulsenpai » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 3:37 PM UTC

fluoridation wrote: post #15

nazgulsenpai wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my understand after reading, he's suggesting that Unreal and Unity's post processing are just applying effects to a camera/rendered frame, when what he wanted to do is simulate the CRT itself across the renderer to the frame that hits the swapchain.

But that's nonsensical. The CRT doesn't see the graphics pipeline of, say, an SNES, it just sees an analog signal. The graphics processing is done in the digital realm, not in the analog realm. If you want to simulate a CRT, all you need is a physical model and a digital image to display, which can come from Unreal, Unity, or whatever any other engine or program or whatever. It makes literally zero sense to write an…

I didn't suggest it makes any sense, just explaining, based on my understanding of the article, why he analogized the game engines to renderers to cameras.

Re: Light on Glass: Why do you start making a game engine?

Re: Light on Glass: Why do you start making a game engine?