I put a real-time 3D shader on the Game Boy Color (opens in new tab)

This was so much fun to read! Very neat solutions using spherical coordinates and logarithms.

How did you get the actual idea to do this in the first place?

It wasn't just a prompt to an AI? How did they do it? ;)

It's not that different from "real 3d" renderers. Especially in deferred rendering pipelines the rasterizer creates a bunch of buffers for depth map, normal map, color, etc but main shaders are running on those 2d buffers. That's the beauty of it parts operating with 3d triangles are kept simple simple and the expensive lighting shaders run once on flat 2d images with 0 overdraw. The shaders don't care whether normal map buffer came from 3d geometry which was rasterized just now, prerendered some time ago or the mix of 2. And even in forward rendering pipelines the fragment shader is operating on implicit 2d pixels created by vertex shaders and rasterizer from "real 3d" data.

The way I look at it if the input and math in the shader is working with 3d vectors its a 3d shader. Whether there is also a 3d rasterizer is a separate question.

Modern 3d games are exploiting it in many different ways. Prerendering a 3D model from multiple views might sound like cheating but use of imposters is a real technique used by proper 3d engines.

It's not that different from how some creative Mac games were doing 3d lighting on 2d textures prior to 3d accelerated hardware being available. The neat part here is that it runs on a Gameboy Colour.

It’s a shader, not a renderer. The images are pre-rendered, but the shading is done in real time.

⇒ I think they’re correct in calling this a 3D shader.

The funny thing is the phrasing used to be more neutral, but I changed the tone to be slightly more skeptical because people thought I was just glazing AI in my post. Another guy on Reddit seemed annoyed that I didn't love AI enough.

I just wanted to document the process for this type of project. shrug

I dunno about the need for disclosure in this way. In my working life I’ve copied a lot of code from stack overflow, or a forum or something when I’ve been stuck. I’ve understood it (or at least tried to) when implementing it, but I didn’t technically write it. It was never a problem though because everybody did this to some degree and no one would demand others disclose such a thing at least in hobby projects or low stakes professional work (obviously it’s different if you’re making like, autopilot software for a passenger plane or something mission critical, that’s notwithstanding).

If it’s the norm to use LLMs, which I honestly believe is the case now or at least very soon, why disclose the obvious? I’d do it the other way around, if you made it by hand disclose that it was entirely handmade, without any AI or stackoverflow or anything, and we can treat it with respect and ooh and ahh accordingly. But otherwise it’s totally reasonable to assume LLM usage, at the end of the day the developer is still responsible for the final result, how it functions, just like a company is responsible for its products even if they contracted out the development of them. Or how a filmmaker is responsible for how a scene looks even if they used abobe after effects to content aware remove an object.

You can pick a used one up for pretty cheap. Add a flash cartridge and you're done. I think the cheap android handhelds of the same form factor are a better option though.

I've still got my Gameboy collection, but rarely use it. It's just so much easier to fire up an emulator these days.

This is pricey but pretty awesome. Very well built, high quality. Hit up a local used game store and have a more modern hardware experience with legit copies of the actual games.

https://www.analogue.co/pocket

I went with getting a GBA SP and replacing the screen with a more modern panel. The kids love it.

You can buy the ModRetro Chromatic from the Oculus VR creator. It's better than anything Nintendo could ever produce.

Aah you're right. That was from my vomit draft and forgot to tidy it up. I'll update the post soon

It's the equivalent of spinning the view camera around in the scene. Up / Down spins the light coordinates, Left / Right spins the camera viewpoint.

Probably could have been written that way though, since it is spinning the camera view rather than the object.

I don't think there's anything recent here, they are just pre-computing a normal map which doubles as already "baking" a 3D-looking image in.