Rendering Tiny Glades With Entirely Too Much Ray Marching
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited as a talk full of rendering tricks, and as an example of what a small team can do with custom tech.
What it is
A Graphics Programming Conference talk on how the game Tiny Glade renders meadows, trees and player-built castles. It covers real-time global illumination, tilt-shift depth of field, stable shadows with continuous time of day, ray marching and GPU-driven rendering on old hardware.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2024 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends MattRix · 2025-01 · on “VoxelSpace: Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code (2020)”
There is lots of cool innovation happening in game tech still. Look at games like Noita, Dreams and Teardown. Or for an even more recent game, look at Tiny Glade. There’s a recent tech talk about it which is full of wizardry: [this video] There is also lots of cool tech happening at the more foundational levels in engines and frameworks, for example Epic’s Nanite/Lumen/MegaLights in UE5.
Cites kuschku · 2024-12 · on “Pat Gelsinger was wrong for Intel”
> Cell required Assembly programming Demoscene skill level to make good use of them, there was a C sdk, but really you wanted to write Assembly, and relatively tricky Assembly at it. > It is one of the reasons why Playstation 3 is the less celebrated one, and the console generation where XBox was able to pull ahead. In retrospect, Cell was a great architecture. In typical Sony fashion it was simply a few years too early. At the time games were single-threaded and many console games still expected CPU and GPU to be in sync. On the PS2, the difference between using the vector accelerator or not was 1.4x – many developers never bothered. But on the PS3 this was simply not an option, as the perf
Cites pornel · 2025-01 · on “Game dev in Rust: a year later”
TinyGlade's (co)developer said he's very satisfied with Rust and the crate ecosystem. They've used Bevy's ECS: [this video] Using individual components instead of the whole big framework isn't necessarily a failure. The components are designed to be usable independently. TinyGlade project started a few years ago, when Bevy's rendering was even more basic. The art style is central to TinyGlade's appeal, so it's not surprising they've built a custom renderer.
Cites pixelpoet · 2025-10 · on “AMD and Sony's PS6 chipset aims to rethink the current graphics pipeline”
As you can tell, I'm patient :) A very important quality for any ray tracing enthusiast lol The ability to do irregular sampling, efficient shadow computation (every flavour of shadow mapping is terrible!) and global illumination is already making its way into games, and path tracing has been the algorithm of choice in offline rendering (my profession since 2010) for quite a while already. Making a flexible rasterisation-based renderer is a huge engineering undertaking, see e.g. Unreal Engine. With the relentless march of processing power, and finally having hardware acceleration as rasterisation has enjoyed for decades, it's going to be possible for much smaller teams to deliver realistic a