Rendering Tiny Glades With Entirely Too Much Ray Marching

What people said

MattRix · 2025-01 · Recommendation

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: [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.

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pixelpoet · 2025-10 · Reference

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 and creative (see e.g. Dreams[0]) visuals with far less engineering effort. Some nice recent examples of this are Teardown[1] and Tiny Glade[2]. It's even more inevitable from today's point of view than it was back in the 90s :) [0] Dreams: [LINK] [1] Teardown: [LINK] [2] Tiny Glade: [VIDEO]

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pornel · 2025-01 · Reference

TinyGlade's (co)developer said he's very satisfied with Rust and the crate ecosystem. They've used Bevy's ECS: [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.

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