Mermaid Heavy Industries @mermaidindustries@mastodon.social

Hey so! I'll be doing a streamed talk at DCG201 (DEFCON New Jersey local) this Friday, 7PM EST, as part of a program on VR tech: https://defcon201.medium.com/dcg-201-online-meet-up-may-2021-virtual-light-d858732751d0

My talk's subject: https://LOVR.ORG (the open source VR library I use); nuts & bolts of VR dev, and how to get started; my game SKATEGIRL DESTROYS THE UNIVERSE (
@mermaidindustries ); and a look into SKATEGIRL'S internals.

The talk after me (7:30) is by Nevyn Bengtsson, talking about https://alloverse.com, another LOVR project.

Which angel is this #sdfidk

This looks *more* interesting in VR, but not so much more interesting I feel like I've got something I can use #sdfidk

What interests me most are the small inconsistencies #sdfidk

It looks kind of interestingly stylized but mostly it just looks like the light ray is refracting at some slightly incorrect angle when it touches the bounds cube #sdfidk

Starting to work on a raymarch shader. I have never done this before. #sdfidk

Postscript: Here are some gorgeous/awful images that came about when I was trying to debug something. I will not be explaining these.

Finally I also did some experiments with expanding Lovr's truetype MSDF shader to do outline and glow effects. This was the image I was happiest with even though it was a bug (a < should have been a >, so instead of the letter outline fading to transparent the "inside" fills the whole glyph quad). It has this great construction-paper-cutout feel (it's a small thing but I love the imperfection inside the "t", it looks like an ink smear) #sdfidk

Also did some first-step experiments with CRT/LED phosphor shaders and even in their simplest forms they went well (look at the moires on the 4th image here!). I wanna play with using SDF techniques + blurring to make surfaces that realistically blur into one slightly-chromatic-aberrated images at a distance but burst out into visible RGB phosphors up close, the way an actual old television would.

Spent the first part of this week working on expanding https://lovr.org 's Truetype/SDF font support to support pixel-art fonts. It went well. I am now one step closer to my dream of somehow making VR look as though you are watching the world itself on a busted VHS tape.

SDF bitmap font test day 1: I am not getting the effect I was going for, although the effect on kanji characters is complicated enough it might count as "stylization". Roman characters unfortunately look neither as-intended nor interesting on their own terms.