Time for reinventing the wheel again! Shadertoy is great and all, but I didn’t find it super comfortable to use. Can’t use your own editor Browsers eat my battery! Instead of staying mad at things, I took this as a learning opportunity and made an offline version. Introducing: Prototoy! Prototoy is a rather simple program, it allows you to load a shader from your disk, show it in a window and watch for file changes to hot reload it....
Raytracers are one of those cool programs that you can write in a few hours and already have something fun to play with. I never got to write one at school so I figured I would spend a day or two and get one going! Because many other sources recommend it, I downloaded Peter Shirley’s book Ray tracing in one weekend and gave it a go. Even though I was familiar with the concepts, it was a good exercise and also surprisingly fun!...
I got into low-level shader optimizations lately, and realised that not many tools are provided for the job. Since i’m looking at GCN assembly regularly now, i used the occasion to write a decent syntax highlighting for it inside vim. That way i got to go through the whole GCN ISA document (props to AMD for having the only public GPU ISA out there) as well as learning some vim scripting basics!...